define good camera.

it's a bit weird because it often turns out that cameras with user interfaces are cheaper economy of scales. that being said, a market for almost barbone sensors on pcb's seems to be building and is lead by raspberry pi's camera modules where the the hq module has a reasonably sizes sensor but still a far cry from mft, aps-c and full frame sizes, but are on parity with most phones. from there it pretty much moves into cameras with ui's but controllable with some kind of vendor sdk or libgphoto. i imagine it's a matter of economies at scale, but for some reason it's almost impossible to buy a good almost barbone sensor and if it's possible e.g. the sensor 61mp ff sensor used in the a7rV is available almost barbone for astro photography, it's still very expensive.

Yes, this is related to the complaint that webcams tend to be lousy cameras, for no good reason.

A Pi HQ camera with a lens of your choice. It's easy to synchronise any number of Pi cameras together, and with the RAM on them each camera can store a long sequence of frames (add an RF-trigger flash using BBC microbits to each one to control motion blur).

That's a component. It needs packaging.[1] That bulky lens needs support that's reasonably rigid and resistant to vibration. Four 2.5mm screws on the PC board of the sensor are not enough. Support needs to be near the center of gravity. In the original article, the author describes his camera mounting problems.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-high-quali...