Industrial Endoscope?

Clickalot wrote:

Has anyone played with one of those for non-gross imagery, like super macros?

I bought something like 20, at $3 each, of these USB endoscopes -- they are among the smallest and cheapest webcams, and have a built-in light.

I've since gotten better alternatives for most uses, but here are some things I used the endoscopes for with at least reasonable results:

1. I was able to mount one on the print head of my 3D printer to get a close-up view of the printing. Kossel-type printers can't take a lot of weight and don't have much space on the print head, and the long USB cable also helps a lot, as does the built-in light.

2. For a while, I was using one on a copy stand to provide a Zoom-compatible live feed of what was essentially a whiteboard. The catch is that image quality falls off at distances greater than about 8-10", and that stand had it about 18" from the stuff I was writing on. I later switched to a $50 5MP industrial USB camera, which also proved inadequate, and have been using a 1080 feed from a Canon 5D IV for the past year (running the feed through a little OpenCV code to rotate the image 180 because the feed is naturally upside down as the camera mounts). Pretty sad that getting a crisp flat-field image took the 5D IV + special software, but I wasn't really using it for anything anyway (it's pretty disappointing compared to the Sonys that I use for most serious photography).

3. I tried using one as a Zoom-compatible webcam that would block the least possible screen area when placed in center, front of my 4K monitor for giving lectures. It works, but the images are again a bit too soft because I'm a little further back than it gets in crisp focus.

4. These make a decent webcam for making a small-object 3D scanner. I supervised a student project which used a cheap laser line, webcam, and stepper-driven rotating table a few years ago... these cameras are quite viable for that. Alternatively, drop the laser and use multiple cameras for stereo vision reconstruction of the 3D.

Overall, the image quality is surprisingly reasonable as cheap webcams go. However, the lens is really hard to do anything with, and the sensor is beyond tiny, so even if you could remove the lens easily, it would be difficult to find a lens that could give a reasonably wide view angle. They can be used with cell-phone add on lenses, although the built-in light then becomes less useful.