 Hello everyone, welcome to Rotor Riot and welcome back to Learn to FPV. On this episode we're going to talk about FPV cameras. So there's a ton of different FPV cameras out there, they come in different sizes and different types and colors and there's a million different variations, but it can kind of boil down to just a few different types. So we're going to go over the specs and I'll give you a general idea of what to look for in an FPV camera. So the first thing to take a look at is the actual size of the camera. This is going to basically break down into four different categories. You get your full-size camera, this is the biggest one, you've got a mini camera, micro and nano. So first up you've got the full-size camera, these have been around the longest and for a long time this is the only size camera you could get. They're a little less common nowadays because the smaller cameras have gotten really good and they've gotten smaller and smaller. So next up you've got your mini camera. So these are just a little bit smaller, a little more compact but typically the guts inside is exactly the same so you're going to get the same kind of performance out of a mini and a micro for that matter as you can get with the full size. So again if you can fit a smaller camera a lot of times you're going to want to. But as we go down you need to keep in mind with all of these is is it going to mount to the frame that you have. So a lot of the cameras will have brackets that make up the difference. What I mean is some frames are designed around the width of a full-size camera. So if you were to put a mini camera in there it's not going to fill the space. There's going to be extra room on either side. So having a bracket like this that's going to take up the extra space and make sure that it fits in any size frame. Next up you have the micros and there's kind of two different types in micros. You have your like I don't know what you call it you have like the partial case micro and that's where you can kind of still see some of the circuit board which is going to be your most ultra light high performance camera and then other micros like this one they have a full case on it so it's a little more protected also a little more heavy and we'll get into lenses in a minute but another difference that you can find in micro cameras is whether they have an m8 lens or m12 lens so smaller lens on this bigger lens on this we'll get into that and then the smallest little guys are nano cameras so even smaller even the lighter and still usually have a really good performance but again you need to make sure you know whether or not that's going to work for your frame like this one in particular it doesn't have any mounting holes on the side of the camera so in my frames I don't have any way to mount that there may be some kind of 3d printed part I could get or have someone print for me that will adapt it and make it work but for me in the frames that I fly I would rather just buy something that I can bolt right into it if I had a super tiny micro where every gram matters then I would figure out a way to make the little micro camera work or nano I mean now other nano cameras like this one they can come as a combo so usually the smaller you go if you're in a really small micro your video transmitter and your camera are going to be sort of combined in one way or another so in this one they're not really combined you could run these totally separate you could change the video transmitter and change the camera they're just soldered together but it all comes as a package like this and the other ones will just be two boards right next to each other so it still kind of just looks like this from a profile view but the backboard is the video transmitter so it'll pretty much be this form factor but it's both your camera and your transmitter another really important spec of the camera is what kind of sensor is in it this mainly breaks down to two different types you have ccd and cmos within cmos there's also a different size of sensor but it's pretty much ccd and cmos and this can get really complicated and technical I don't want to go too much in depth on it there's already a ton of videos on youtube that you can watch in cmos versus ccd but to keep it really basic ccd's been around longer at one point in time there was some cmos cameras but there was drawbacks to them so they would either have a little more latency or they just kind of do funny things nowadays either way you go both can be really good cameras so I wouldn't say that one is better than the other they just have different qualities to them in general I would say a ccd sensor is a little more natural you'll you'll see less sort of weird things go on with colors it kind of just looks very consistent and doesn't really do weird things and I don't want to make it sound like cmos is full of all these weird things it's just a little different so some of the advantages to a cmos cameras that can have better saturation sometimes they have more resolution or more tv lines they can have a prettier image to look at but there is the downside of they they can do weird things at times so people will call it like pixel shimmering you just see some weird little artifacting in the images sometimes colors can shift around a little bit again I don't want to make it sound bad because it definitely has its advantages but I would just say ccd's a little more natural and a little more always looks consistently the same now within cmos like I said some of them have a larger sensor like the runcam eagle this can play a big advantage because with a larger sensor you're capturing more information and you're letting in more light so they can handle flying in low light or night situations better speaking of that another thing to think about is some cameras are designed specifically for night flying so if you work late you don't ever get out until the sun's down you may want a camera that's really good for low light or for night flying another thing about ccd versus cmos is that daytime versus nighttime thing so there's kind of you can find kind of conflicting information there's not always going to be one or the other but I would say in general in my experience a ccd camera handles low light and night a little better than cmos I think there's some cameras that have tweaked their settings or especially the ones with the bigger sensor that do better at night than a ccd but in general I would say ccd maybe handles night a little better I can't really give you a recommendation on which of those you should pick I would just suggest watch videos on youtube and just see what the different camera qualities are going to look like between ccd and cmos and kind of pick for yourself what you would like because it's going to come to preference for me I kind of like ccd better I kind of like the natural look but it's also really nice the way that cmos sensors have a really rich colors the greens are greener it's pretty to look at so it's just going to come down to your personal preference cameras may be one of those things that when you're first starting out you just buy a couple different ones of different types and just give them a few flights or a few weeks or a few months of flying and just figure out what you like it's going to really come down to preference okay another spec is the lens of the camera so there's pretty big variety here too so for one you have different size lenses so by size I mean the mount that actually screws into the camera body so there's two main types this one's a m12 meaning that it's 12 millimeters wide this one's a m8 meaning that it's eight millimeters wide obviously the eight millimeter it's a more lightweight smaller lens less likely to get broken in a crash but the larger lens is usually going to be a little better image it's got more room to let light in and information in and a lot of times you're going to have a glass front instead of plastic so it's just going to maybe give a little sharper image but just something to know another thing about lenses is the focal length so this can range anywhere you're going to see numbers like 2.5 or 1.8 2.1 even 3.6 even though I don't think anybody uses that basically how that works is the lower the number the wider the field of view so if you were to have a 3.6 millimeter lens you can only see this small area and you're going to feel really zoomed into what you're looking at whereas if you go with a 1.8 lens it's going to be really wide and you're going to feel like you're further back from everything but you're also just going to be able to see more a lot of people I think tend to find themselves in the middle like I like a 2.5 it's kind of mid-range it feels natural but you do give up some peripheral vision so a wide lens can give you a lot more information like a tree that was completely invisible to you on a 2.5 millimeter lens when you make it wider now all of a sudden you can see that you know that's there so a wide lens can really help but again this is going to come down to preference another thing to think about is typically the wider you go the more distortion you get and the more fisheye becomes so the horizon instead of being flat is going to kind of curve off some lenses kind of handle this better and you can get a more linear looking lens that is wide but these are just things to think about so you want to know when you're buying a camera what kind of lens does it come with and then what size is it and if you were to want to change the lens make sure you know that it's going to be easy to swap it out make sure that the store that you like to shop at has a selection of lenses with that size mount and the ranges of different focal lengths that you would want to try okay another big one is the aspect ratio of the camera so you're either going to have 16 by 9 or 4 by 3 or some cameras can actually switch back and forth this is going to be really important and make sure that you pair it with your goggles whatever the goggles are if you mix and match it can be a really distorted image and make it difficult to fly particularly if you have 4 by 3 goggles with a 16 by 9 camera that just looks really wonky so whatever your goggles are make sure you get the same aspect ratio of your camera or you get one that can switch and if you have a drone already and you haven't gotten goggles try to get the goggles that are going to match the aspect ratio of that camera okay another one is audio some cameras will or will not have a little microphone on it so it can pick up audio and you can plug a headphone in and hear the audio on the quad some people love this and don't fly without it some people hate it i really don't like the audio but it's just something to know if you think you may want to be able to hear the motor noise in a headphone some cameras will and some cameras won't have audio next we have OSD and this can get a little confusing because almost every camera will mention OSD but there's multiple meanings for that so truly when i say OSD what i'm talking about is on-screen display of information so that's like mainly the voltage of your battery some cameras have a built-in on-screen display where you can run a wire to your power source and the camera on its own can tell you what the voltage of your battery is so this will give you an indication of when to land but other cameras when they say OSD what they're really talking about is the settings in the camera so it's kind of on-screen display because there is text that will pop up and there's menus that you can go and change but don't get that confused for on-screen display that's going to give you information about your battery so just about every camera will have these settings that you can change through their OSD usually on the back there's a couple different sets of pins so one is going to be your main set of pins that are for your power to the camera and then the signal coming out of it and then the other set of pins are almost all cameras come with a little separate circuit board that you can plug in there and then go through the buttons and you can cycle through all the different menus and change the different settings on your camera so you can change the sharpness the contrast sometimes the saturation different things you can change i typically kind of just leave things default i don't like to play with it too much but just understand that's what some cameras mean by OSD and if you're looking for a camera that actually gives you voltage you're just going to have to look at the product description a little closely and make sure that it specifically says that it's going to read out voltage okay lastly another option that you can get in fpv cameras is fpv cameras that not only send the video back to you but also record it in hd on board so not everybody wants to throw an expensive gopro on top of their quad or some other action camera but they still want to be able to get some good hd footage so these are a nice option to be able to record at least pretty good hd footage it's not exactly as good as a gopro but it's pretty good footage for a lot cheaper so where your typical fpv camera costs anywhere from like 20 to 40 bucks for around 70 bucks you can get a camera like a runcam split caddx turtle or foxy or mix that will act as your fpv camera but also give you hd recording so that's another option to look at okay so that's going to do it for the basics of fpv cameras i could there's definitely a lot deeper you could go into cameras but i really just want to keep it basic for the beginner pretty much any fpv camera you get will get the job done so there's a ton of different cameras out there each different one is going to look slightly different but it's not necessarily that one's better than the other one guy may love camera x but this guy hates it you just can't stand the way that looks there's just different preferences so again like i've mentioned before you can go to rotorbuilds.com and you can look at different people's builds and look for cameras that you keep seeing over and over and over again those are probably going to be very good cameras another thing is here on youtube we have a ton of different reviewers that are going to review every new product so you can get really in-depth information about the camera you're looking at and you can get an idea of what the footage is going to look like so i hope that's been helpful i hope that gives you the basic things you should be looking for in an fpv camera so once again thanks for watching and this has been learned to fpv