Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 NoIR review

By Savalio

So, I was away for a bit. Why? I just wanted to take a break and just follow my heart. Soo I ended up with 2 Pi Zero 2 W’s, and a Pi camera module I’m going to be talking about. Let’s see if this is as good as the regular!

Part 1: Setup

So, for this you’ll need:

The camera (DO NOT OPEN BOX YET)
A Pi
Some kind of grounding*
Pi Camera to Pi Zero CSI port**

* although optional, still highly recommended. I accidentally killed my first camera module with static even though the humidity in my room is at the comfortable 50%.

** required only if you’re using any kind of Pi Zero.

After getting the supplies, ground yourself and open the camera module box. It should include the camera, a regular cable and a piece of blue film. At first I thought that was a filter that will remove the saturation, but it made things worse on the color side.

Get out your camera module, and if you’re using the Pi Zero, yoink that cable and take out the cable you bought. Both for the Pi and the camera, have the piece of film on the cable face away from the board(image 2).

If you’re on the regular Pi, then, on the most versions, film should be facing the Ethernet port(image 1). Lift up the black tab and insert in the correct orientation.

Look closely near the Pi, black film is looking upwards

Now, the great thing is, Camera Module 3 works without any software setup, so it’s plug-and-play. Just boot up your pi and enter this into terminal:

libcamera-hello

In a second, you’ll see a camera preview if you have a desktop environment and copies of a line like this outputted in the console:

#111 (30.01 fps) exp 16834.00 ag 1.12 dg 1.06

To take a photo, you can enter this command:

libcamera-still -o coolname.jpg

Note: the setup and use applies to the regular camera module 3 too

Part 2: Review

Note: the review only applies to the NoIR version. Normal camera module review and more expansive testing will be done in the second part

So, let’s get to the pros and cons shall we?

Pros:

Picks up IR light
Includes an IR filter to correct the colors
Picks up most if not all the colors indoors
High quality photos
High quality build
Low price ($25 for regular & NoIR, $35 for regular & NoIR wide)
Easy to use
Ships with a cable compatible with most of the RPi versions

Cons:

Colors are lost if photos are taken of the outdoors
IR filter doesn’t do that great of a job correcting colors
Very ESD static sensitive
Doesn’t include a cable for Pi Zero
Focus is off sometimes

To clear some things up, it’s a pretty dang good camera. Indoor photos all looked good and I was wondering why were people showing the scarily saturated photos. But when I took photos of the outside, I understood why.

So this is not really recommended if you’re doing any kind of outdoor photography where color really matters. It’s not big deal if you want to do object recognition, using the camera for security reasons or if you don’t care about the color. I couldn’t get it to work with motioneye though. So, here are all the test images: