The end of 2015 is upon us and now it is time to look back and see what the year brought us in the shape of affordable slow motion gear. While many cameras had higher frame rates, only a few really shined and delivered on the promise of offering HD quality and higher than normal frames per second in an attractive price point and one that you may already own if you have a recent mobile device.
The VR of the 1990s was a certified gimmick ; technology wasn’t there for the most part and a simple system then by today’s standards was worth millions of dollars. Fast forward to 2011 when an inventive young man “only 18 years old then” Palmer Luckey built the first prototype of a VR headset in his parents garage. By the 6th generation prototype he named it the Rift and had a Kickstarter project to be able to launch to the gadget gamer community “raising US $2.4 million or 974% of its original target”.
John Carmack the genius programmer of ID software fame had an Oculus prototype headset and was blown away by it; he modded it to better performance and was able to run a Doom 3 edition on the headset in 2012. Carmack is now the Chief technology officer CFO at Oculus VR. The interest in VR intensified and blew up right after the adoption of the technology by some of the best minds in the gaming industry. Mark Zuckerberg was so into it and the possibilities it could bring to the future of social media that Facebook acquired Oculus VR for 2 Billion USD in March 2014. Talk about a successful meteoric rise for such a young company! → Continue Reading Full Post ←
For many of us it seems counter intuitive to own a camera that doesn’t shoot color images. In this day and age of technological marvels, being constrained by black and white / monochrome output on recording is a strange proposition. For the world of high speed imaging however you have to re-examine the entire debate from a benefits point of view and why it could be ideal to have monochrome instead of RGB color as your high speed option.
Depending on the intended use Monochrome might give you more bang for your buck and save you a lot of money on lighting and power requirements to run those lights. To understand the benefits we need to dig in on why Monochrome camera sensors excel in areas where color sensors suffer and why this will hardly change with current sensor technology in the near future.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
During the review of the edgertronic camera;HSCasked Mike Matter the brains behind it a series of questions “some submitted by our readers” regarding past present and future of the high speed camera market, sensors and where things are going in the camera market. Many of his answers are very detailed and offer a glimpse into his own efforts and how he sees the future evolving with the continual adoption of high speed capable devices.
With 4k TVs, projectors and computer displays entering the marketplace in droves it is only a matter of time until 4k finds it’s way into the super slow motion realm for TV, Cinema and scientific analysis.
There is a strong argument for the increased resolution when it comes to capturing at 4k in any frame rate. It gives freedom to crop or punch in for a Full HD shot and or stabilize footage with crop leeway on the borders without trashing a shot. It is also crisp in a way that can only be described as looking through a window; which is a funny analogy because when Full HD came out in the early 2000s that was used often to sell TVs and the new experience. Now we are told the real window is 4k and your perfectly functional 1080p 240Hz tv is next to useless. This is of course hardly a realistic view or currently installed TV technology.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
