Click! Ultra-High-Speed Digital Camera

Polo writes: "Remember looking at those photos of bullets going through lightbulbs, apples and playing cards? Well, here is a fascinating digital camera from Visible Solutions that can capture images at over 1000 frames per second (with reduced resolutions up to 32000 fps!) The standard camera has 256M of memory to capture a whopping 2 seconds of video upgradeable to 1G to capture 8 seconds. You can also daisy-chain several cameras with firewire to capture an "event" from many angles. Here is the only slow-motion sequence on their site. What would you capture?" 1GB to capture 8 seconds -- sheesh! I'd like to see real slo-mo a little more affordable, but it takes extremes to create nice middles, eh?

Comments

there is another way

[Bullschmidt]

I am currently taking a class in high speed photography at MIT (6.163, or strobe lab), and the cheaper, but not necessarily easier, way is to use a strobe light to flash the event so that it is frozen in time.

The idea is that your strobe needs to be about 10x brighter than the ambient light (at least). The other alternative is to be in the dark. Then you open the shutter, flash the strobe when you want it, and then close the shutter. The event will be "frozen" when ever you flashed the strobe.

This, of course, requires a camera with a "bulb" setting so you can leave the shutter open. But its pretty neat. We've done the "shooting the card sideways" shot just recently. Its pretty cool to actually see the event (not just on a photograph!)