ELP USB16MP01-L180 Wide Angle Fisheye USB Camera

Sammy

May 15, 2023

Perfect for a sky camera

I wanted a sky camera to record the weather and the stars. This camera has not disappointed me. It has a great crisp image and is easy to set up with its USB interface. I mounted mine in a weatherproof enclosure with an acrylic CCTV camera dome mounted on top.

Really fisheye, OK price, very curved images, works

One possible downer is just how heavy, thick at 0.1865”(4.7mm), and kind of stiff the USB cable is. I mean wow it’s really a monster. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to be this bulky. It’s also sort of oddly stiff, not so stiff that it stays in a shape you put it in, but it’s resistive yet pliable. It’s just odd compared to just about every other camera I’ve ever used. And it measures 39" tip to board. There is a pretty hefty glue on the lens, this really is a good thing as it means it will stay put when mounted on a robot or other platform that will have vibration and motion. I haven’t tried, but I’m sure it would be removable if you had a need to change the lens.

As for function, I’ve had it rejected by Windows 10 a few times, but a quick disconnect and reconnect and it’s good to go. I’m not sure yet if this is a connector problem or something else. The connector was a little bit crushed out of the box and I had to bend it back to fit the USB port properly. Once it is recognized it really does see a lot and a tad beyond 180 degrees! I’ve also noticed that it really does need a fair amount of good lighting for a bright picture. It really sees akin to the human eye, which can be good or bad depending on your use case.

I think this is going to be a really good camera for some machine vision projects!

Easy to instal with great viewing angles, it falls short on video quality.

Synopsis: The ELP 16MP camera is a barebones solution to getting a small camera just about anywhere. Simply plug and play with a true 180 degree lens, placed in a corner it’ll capture all the action. With mediocre unsharp video at best though, issues with frame rates, dynamic range and with no support from ELP to upgrade the image control, this camera falls short of a premium product.

Detailed Review:

The camera came packaged nicely and safely making sure that it wasn't damaged during shipping. Unboxing it, I was not surprised by the barebone appearance of it. The pictures in the description portrayed it accurately. It is literally a camera on a module board with a 4-pin USB cable coming out of it. No fancy case, no mount or anything really to secure the camera. That's not necessarily a negative though, depending on your use case.

Setting up this camera is as simple as advertised. It’s plug and play. Windows gets a driver and you’re up and running. The best part about this camera is it can be plugged into a wide variety of systems and it just works.

Immediately the most apparent option to use this camera is for a small security camera placed in an inconspicuous area. Utilizing USB extenders and its small size (*see picture of it in my hand for reference*) would allow you to place this virtually anywhere that you wanted to with some screws or even some type of adhesive material. It's light enough that you might be able to even get away with blue tack holding it in place. I happen to have a 3D printer and plan on designing a case and mount option for it giving it some extra protection and mounting options.

Utilizing a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop with software as a hub for one or several of these would enable you to have a pretty comprehensive security system ad-hoc style. The lens is a true 180° lens that when viewing the captured video is a cutoff circle in the middle of the frame. Definitely enough viewing angle to capture an entire room from any corner. The distortion of the image is as expected for such an extreme wide angle lens. As for the video, it does capture at a large resolution, 2320x1744 for HD capture in my case, though the extreme distortion of the lens only renders about 90% of the pixels as usable for viewing action with the black areas around the lens.

The dynamic range and exposure capabilities of the camera struggles. On auto settings, grainy, muddied and low shutter issues is what you’ll get in darker situations, needing a fair bit of lighting to get it up to acceptable quality. The camera also struggles with outdoor settings as well. In the picture you can see that the bright areas are extremely clipped on an overcast day with the foreground being visible. Even in bright environments it seems like the camera can’t adjust the shutter rate effectively enough to compensate for the brightness. Taking manual control can mitigate this a little, but you’ll always run into some issues with two extremes in the image. Though, if you can manage to find that slice of middle ground of both high and lows, probably using some additional lighting or light control, it has acceptable quality at best.

I tried to go to ELP’s website to see if there is any additional software or program that might be able to help with these issues, but every download on the site showed a ‘Sorry, the product was not found’ error. So I was stuck with the basic windows sliders to try and handle the mediocre image quality.

In the end, the ELP 16MP USB Camera has its pluses and minuses. It's small and lightweight enough that it can be placed just about anywhere. With the true 180* lens, you’ll be able to capture everything that happens in a room. The camera’s image quality leaves a lot to be desired though. With poor low and bright light performance, its use cases are very limited. The higher resolution camera is kind of lost on the poor dynamic range. The lack of software support from the website leaves you stuck with the basic control. But if you can find a sweet spot indoors, it might be the ad-hoc camera for you. Though, it'll probably end up being a novelty camera that will end up on some random fun project with my kids, rather than a serous tool.

Thank you for reading and later days.

Fisheye is glued to it, otherwise really nice camera for projects

Plug and play with windows and Linux (rpi). Using just the win11 camera app and it was immediately recognized. Plugged in to my desktop, I'm getting 55-65ms video feed. Distortion from the fisheye is crazy, but normal. Lens is nice and clear.

Three issues: the fisheye is glued on with some silicone like stuff so swapping it will take some cleanup, the cable is super finicky and dropps signal so I'll probably need to replace that, and I can't get windows to recognize the highest resolution for some reason. I'll have to use something more full featured than the camera app and vlc player to actually report on that though.

Very heavily curved images

I wanted this to do remote checks on my 3d printer. The clarity and focus were good but a lot of light is needed to get that. It connected immediately to windows with no additional drivers so really Plug N Play.

The image is more severely curved than I was lead to believe by the pictures in the product listing. I was doing close up and their pic was a distant shot. The comparison image of others and theirs for image clarity does not show the curvature of the image so how can we know it was taken with this camera.

The wires were heaver than I believe necessary and were stiff to move around and get into position.

All in all I am not sure it is a great value for the money.

Customer

April 16, 2023

Wow! Awesome camera, espeically for embedded! Having issues with some software.

Update: I have had more of a chance to work on my weather camera project. I continue to be impressed with this camera's abilities. Using v4l2-utils in Linux to manually adjust the camera settings and using Motion to capture, I was able to seriously crank up the ability of the camera to see at night. It very successfully can see the clouds even with no moon. I see next to no signs of hot pixels, even when fully cranked up to max. Very impressed! I have uploaded three new images of the sky taken by this camera. One is cloudless, one is clouds in moonlight, and the other is very light clouds with no moon- and the clouds can still be seen. Eventually this camera will go way up above the lights and trees on top of an antenna pole.

Original review:

I got this camera to work along side another ELP camera for a weather observation system that I am custom building, as I have tornadoes in my area commonly. This camera's wide angle will look straight up for a whole-sky view, while the other will be able to pan-tilt to actually focus in on a suspicious cloud. This way I can keep an eye on what's going on outside while remaining safe (and dry). High resolution and the ability to see in low light are important to this project.

The 180-degree wide-angle is actually a slight understatement. It's over 180, the lens will actually see even slightly behind itself, it's unreal. I can't say that slight amount over 180 is very useful, but it's there. This is certainly a fish-eye, not a wide-angle rectilinear. This means that the corners of the sensor end up unused.

As with my other ELP high-resolution camera, I'm having issues getting it to work at anything over 8MP (which is still very good) with most Windows software such as Microsoft Camera. I don't really know where the particular issue is, because I have a solid computer, and OBS Studio runs the camera full-bore (both full resolution and full frame rate) without any problems. AMCap also runs it, but it crashes a lot. Motion on Linux also has no problem. So I really don't think the issue is the camera, or the hardware. I haven't been able to narrow down what it is, but keep this in mind if you're intending on using it with Windows. This could easily be an issue with my computer, too.

My intended target for this camera is being used with a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC, using Motion. Motion is a free command-line based webcam server, and it runs this camera flawlessly. My Raspberry Pi can't run it at full frame rate, but that's ok for my application and it's also no fault of the camera.

I included a dark image along with the photos I uploaded. Yes, it looks very dark, but that's because it actually is. The camera can see pretty much exactly what my eyes see. That means that in low light, it's as good as the human eye. Further tweaks to exposure times can even improve that at the expense of frame rate. This will be perfect for my application.

Now for the bonus that really got me excited: the wide-angle lens can be removed easily to expose the bare sensor as it is held on by two screws. This means that this could also be used with custom optics, as a sensor for a telescope, or used in any number of odd projects where a bare sensor may be useful. I also noticed that the IR-blocking filter is attached to the lens, which is also awesome because it could in theory be removed. This would further improve low-light (at the expense of severely hurting color), especially when looking at clouds or illuminating the area with IR LEDs. It also means that this could be converted into a near-IR camera very easily by replacing it with an IR-pass filter. I may have to pick up a couple more of these, I have other projects in mind now too. NOTE: Removing the lens is not safe for the camera, and not recommended unless you have good reason and know what you're doing. Never touch the sensor or the IR filter, and a single spec of dust in there will show up on your images. Scratches are permanent and will wreck your image. I would not be at all surprised if this voids any warranty, especially if actual modifications are made. Still, this is a hobbyist's dream.

The USB cable that it comes with can be detached, which can allow this to very easily be connected directly to an SBC or other embedded project without the need to use the USB connector. This can save space and weight in embedded projects.

I have included two images taken from the camera. It is very difficult to portray lighting conditions, and I can't upload a full 16MP image. The dark image was literally all the lights in the room turned off (and I closed the door, but there's still a window). Yes it's dark, but the room was that dark. Details can still be made out just as good as I could with by bare eyes. The light image shows an inset at full resolution (at least it was when I uploaded the image). Essentially the whole image is actually at the resolution of that inset.

Super-Mini Moreness

I had recently also acquired the zoom version of such a camera from the same manufacturer, ELP, and I thought it was small to be so packed full of features, but this fish-eye version is even smaller. See pic. (And no, wiseacre, I do not have outlandishly freakishly outside ginormously large hands! Thank you! :D :) )

Eh-hemm, as I was saying, the size is most impressive and especially if used in surveillance and industrial work or any kind of computer miniaturisation this camera is excellent. It works with pretty much all operating systems and has tons of features. Some I don't feel qualified to comment on despite having good experience in the field.

The fish-eye does what fish-eyes do. The camera and lens works great and ofc what exactly you're going to be doing with it will determine which features you'll use. It's a competent company that makes good products so I have confidence that when I find what exactly I'm going to use this for, it will work well. :D

A very good deal. :)