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A Seriously High Speed Video Camera (Video)
Mike Matter was showing off his edgertronic (named after Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton) high speed video camera at O'Reilly's inaugural Solid conference, when Tim Lord happened by his little show booth and started interviewing Mike with his normal speed camcorder. While Tim's camcorder shoots 720p at 30 or 60 frames per second, the edgertronic video camera shoots 720P at 700 frames per second, and can shoot lesser resolutions at up to 18,000 frames per second. But the big breakthrough here isn't performance. It's price. Most high-speed video cameras cost $20,000 to $50,000 (or even more), while Mike's edgertronic starts at a mere $5,495.00. This is still a little steep for hobby photographers, but is not bad for a tool used by professionals. And Kickstarter? You bet! Last year Mike raised $170,175, which was much more than his $97,900 goal. Now he's busy making and shipping cameras, working so many hours that he doesn't have time for his own photography. But sometimes that's the way life goes, and Mike seems to be handling it well. (Alternate Video Link)
More likely it's using cells as always on, and sampling the signal strength directly with a clocked chip. At that point, your sampling speeds depend on how quickly the cells can change state and how fast you can offload the sampled data.
Based on the product's name, he's probably also making use of stroboscopic properties in interpretation by the sampling software to minimize the amount of data required to be handled in the offloading process.
The cells he's using could be taking advantage of the kerr effect to increase the number of cells in a usable state at any given moment and thus increase the sampling speed accordingly, but he could also just be using fast cells, or use a holographic system, or any other number of methods of assigning cell sets per sample.
He could even be using slow cells, and taking advantage of the stroboscopic effect in software to approximate the actual potential any cell should have if its actual potential and those of nearby cells has not changed since the prior sample.
Interesting, no matter which method he used. And something that's actually worth patenting and licensing the patent for.
"I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being builtâ"one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."
-- Douglas Hartree
There are billions of smart people out there, just because you fail to see a purpose doesn't mean there isn't one, it just means you aren't the one making it rich in this niche.
and 700-18000 fps. Plus some people even get motion sickness from 120 Hz TVs. Wonder how they'd fare watching a 700 fps video?