Do all arducam need the "Arducam-F Shield"? The information on this is so greatly lacking to the extent that no related youtube videos could be found, no internet material and the seller seems to be very important and not answer to my questions as he is supposed to.
Also he appears to be the only seller to offer such a variety of arduino cameras.



I want to choose colored arduino camera for my project, but I am unable to receive enough information so that I can choose the appropriate arduino camera.

The most important for me to know is does all arduino cameras need the arducam-f shield board in order to work properly (i.e be programmable, colored, with "decent" quality and be able to capture photos in less than 1~2 seconds)




This is "5MP Mega pixel OV5642 Sensor Camera Module w CS mount Lens" It costs US $29.99. The description doesn't mention the need of any other 3rd party hadware in order to work.





This bellow is "Arducam-F Shield V2 Camera module shield /w OV2640 for Arduino UNO MEGA2560 DUE" it costs US $29.99 and is a camera that evidently comes with this magical shield. We can see that the version is slightly older than that on the other cameras.





This is "2 Mega pixel Camera Module MT9D111 JPEG Out + HQ lens" for US $21.99 and also, like in any other description, the need of shields is not mentioned





And this is "2Megapixel MT9D111 Auto Focus lens camera flex module with Adpater board" that has autofocus, is 2MP like the one above, comes with .... ?Adapter board"? (nothing like that is shown in the pictures or described in the description) and costs only US $9.99. It looks ugly compared to other cameras.






These was the 4 example arduino cameras I would choose from and do all of them need arduino shields in order to do what a camera should do?
(Explaining differences, pros and cons will be very useful to everyone who are in the same boat as I am)
You have three requirements:


Good quality (colour)
High resolution
Fast operation


Those three requirements together mean you cannot use a normal Arduino.


The Arduino has nether the memory nor processing power to directly communicate with a camera module.
The ones you can communicate with have internal buffer memory and use a slow UART interface to transfer a frame. That is not fast.
The Arduino cannot deal with a large picture regardless of speed. All you can do is pass the image through to somewhere else for processing. Slowly.


So you can either have very low resolution or slow speed.

So use a Raspberry Pi or something similar which is more capable of using a camera (indeed, the Pi has a dedicated camera connection).