I’m having a trouble getting good picture out of the IMX708. Tried both Arducam B0482 and Raspberry Pi Module V3-12MP IMX708. Both produces the same results.
The same camera works fine on the Raspberry Pi. So the question is should it even work Jetson Orin Nano?
So far I had a very bad experience with cameras on Jetson. I just need something that is wide angle and works. But everything is god damn outdated, the cameras I may use are 5 years old, SDK at least 1 year old, some AI libs that work are also 3-4 year old. You can’t upgrade anything, because it will break some dependance. The whole setup is so fragile.
First, thank you for an incredibly detailed and well-written post. We can see the effort you’ve put in, and we want to acknowledge that your frustration with the Jetson ecosystem is understandable and shared by many. You have correctly diagnosed a very complex issue.
Let’s get straight to the technical root cause. The issue you are seeing is the difference between a raw sensor output and a fully processed image. The pink/magenta image is the classic symptom of a sensor operating without a specific ISP (Image Signal Processor) tuning file for the platform.
On Raspberry Pi: The Pi Foundation has a mature, built-in ISP with excellent tuning files for popular cameras like the IMX708. It “knows” how to correctly process the colors from that specific sensor.
On NVIDIA Jetson: The NVIDIA ISP is incredibly powerful, but it requires a unique, professionally created tuning file for each sensor to get accurate colors. Without this file, the ISP doesn’t know how to interpret the raw Bayer data, resulting in the image you see.
You are doing everything right. Your gst-launch command is correctly pulling the raw data from the sensor. However, there is currently no public, robust ISP tuning file for the IMX708 on the Jetson platform. The image quality is a known limitation for this sensor on this hardware.
To solve your underlying problem of “needing something wide-angle that just works,” I would strongly recommend a camera that has mature ISP support on Jetson. The IMX477 sensor, for example, is natively supported by NVIDIA’s own drivers and ISP, delivering excellent image quality out of the box.
I’m sorry that the answer isn’t a simple fix for the IMX708, but I hope this clear explanation helps save you more hours of frustration.
Can you please suggest me a camera that is wide angle and that produced focused color image that I can process on Nvidia Orin Nano? I remember in the early 00s webcams were terrible, but I still think that they produced better image then I can get now with these Arducams in 2025 on expensive Nvidia hardware. I’d very much be thankful if my next purchase of cameras (yes, I order couple in a hope that they would work) would actually work decently.
