My question on camera selection, for the moment, has one answer. Unfortunately I can’t afford it, and it still needs a lot of work. The Frankencamera project now supports one consumer available hardware platform, the Nokia N900. There’s lots going against it, too, such as really slow switching between live preview and high-resolution photo capture, but they are things I could work on – if I had anything it worked with. I might look at using it with UVC, but it won’t be nearly as useful as the raw sensor access it has in the N900.