Color stripes persist and black screen on Raspberry Pi camera despite fresh Raspberry Pi OS

Raspberry Pi Cameras
1

Hi all, I’ve got an Arducam 12MP IMX477 camera hooked up to a Raspberry Pi and I’m seeing these weird color stripes running through the output. The image is basically unusable because of them. Everything is wired up per the docs, but the stripes won’t go away. Has anyone run into this before?

2

Thanks for the report. We actually took the code you shared and ran it on our own Raspberry Pi here, and we could not reproduce the color stripes at all. That’s usually a sign the problem may be tied to your specific hardware or setup rather than a general driver bug.

Since we haven’t found a root cause yet, let’s try to isolate it on a Raspberry Pi 4. Please do the following:

  1. Flash a fresh OS image to your SD card
  2. Follow the driver configuration guide here:
    12MP IMX477 - Arducam Wiki
  3. After setup and reboot, test using only this command:
libcamera-still -t 0

Please report back with the results.

3

Okay, I did a completely fresh install and followed the guide step by step. Unfortunately the result looks even worse than before. The color stripes are still there, but now I mostly get a black screen and can’t see any image at all. I’m starting to think this might be a hardware issue — maybe a defective board that connects all the cameras.

4

Sorry to hear it got worse. Just to make sure we’re looking at the right thing, can you confirm which OS image you flashed and the exact command you used for the test?

5

Sure. I’m on the latest Raspberry Pi OS, completely fresh installation. After following the guide and rebooting, the only command I ran was:

libcamera-still -t 0

Here’s a video of what I’m seeing:
video

6

Thanks, the video helps. One important question before we go further: is this happening on a Raspberry Pi 4, or are you using a third-party carrier board with the camera?

7

It’s a Raspberry Pi 4B — everything was tested on the 4B. Here are a few photos of my test setup:

1730728266066.jpg
1730728266101.jpg
1730728266113.jpg

8

Thanks for confirming. The fact that the symptoms persisted — and actually got worse — after a completely fresh Raspberry Pi OS install (color stripes plus black screen) points away from a software or driver configuration problem and toward a possible hardware fault, most likely in the board that connects the cameras.

So to summarize where we stand right now: the issue is still unresolved and the root cause is under investigation. Our current conclusion is that this is likely hardware-specific, since we’re unable to reproduce the color stripes on our own Pi 4/5 setups. We’ll review the setup photos and video and continue from there.