For the first time, subelectron readout noise has been achieved with a camera dedicated to astronomical wavefront-sensing applications. The OCam system demonstrated this performance at a 1300 Hz frame rate and with 240 × 240 pixel frame size. ESO and JRA2 OPTICON jointly funded e2v Technologies to develop a custom CCD for adaptive optics (AO) wavefront-sensing applications. The device, called CCD220, is a compact Peltier-cooled 240 × 240 pixel frame-transfer eight-output back-illuminated sensor using the EMCCD technology. This article demonstrates, for the first time, subelectron readout noise at frame rates from 25 Hz to 1300 Hz and dark current lower than 0.01 e- pixel-1 frame-1 . It reports on the quantitative performance characterization of OCam and the CCD220, including readout noise, dark current, multiplication gain, quantum efficiency, and charge transfer efficiency. OCam includes a low-noise preamplifier stage, a digital board to generate the clocks, and a microcontroller. The data acquisition system includes a user-friendly timer file editor to generate any type of clocking scheme. A second version of OCam, called OCam2 , has been designed to offer enhanced performance, a completely sealed camera package, and an additional Peltier stage to facilitate operation on a telescope or environmentally challenging applications. New features of OCam2 are presented in this article. This instrumental development will strongly impact the performance of the most advanced AO systems to come.