HRC is a miniaturised black and white imager with 5 m ground resolution. The telescope is of the Cassegrain type with an aperture size of 115 mm and a focal length of 2296 mm. It has a detector based on a CCD (charge coupled device) and uses 3D packaging technology. It contains 1024 x 1024 pixels of 14 mm size. The HRC requires a highly stable and accurate pointing of its two-dimensional CCD to an Earth-fixed target using the "point and stare" feature of the spacecraft. The field of view (along the diagonal of the detector) is 0.504°. Images are digitised to 10 bits before transmission to the spacecraft.

HRC provides grey scale images, approximately 25 km square with a pixel resolution of 5 m. It has a spatial resolution of 8 m. The camera has been used by students from selected Belgian schools whose experiment proposals have been accepted under the EDUPROBA project.

Images of Earth and other data gathered by PROBA-1 are sent to a web server located at the ESA ground station in Redu, Belgium, where scientists are able to access the information over the internet as soon as it is delivered from the satellite.