There is no question that DigitalRev TV is the Top Gear of camera reviews on the internet. We are big fans of the antics of Kai and Lok doing all sorts of cool shoots and taking the mundane out of camera testing by making it fun or even ridiculous.
This time around they have decided to try the Sony RX10 II and The Sony RX100 IV slow motion feature for a spin. The video is educational also going over the basics of slow motion shooting with these cameras and comparing them with smartphones capable of doing slow motion. Our reader Rommel alerted us to this video.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
In our last post we looked at the HSC768 high speed camera project that had great performance and ergonomics including a jog wheel design and machined case. We asked the creator of the camera David Kronstein, who runs the Youtube channel Tesla500 from Vancouver Canada, a few questions regarding the future of the project and he kindly responded with some great insight. We may have a third competitor in the HD high speed camera market to go head to head with the edgertronic camera and the yet to be released fps1000 project.
While the camera is still in the lab stages, it shows a usable design with professional looking performance and a pretty lengthy buffer. There is a touch screen interface based on a stripped down Linux OS installation and DDR3 high speed DRAM 16GB worth that can do quite a good set of frames.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
tesla500 is a Youtube and Patreon video channel by Electronics Engineer David Kronstein that has a lot of videos of engineering projects and troubleshooting / fixing stuff. Some videos are based on a homebrew camera project that gained our attention. The camera is a high speed monochrome at the moment with HSC768 name which is based on the data rate of the image sensor, in this case 768Mpix/s, or about 960MB/s . The camera project started in 2014 as a way to get a high speed camera for the lab without paying the hefty premium.
Renowned filmmaker / DP and all around nice guy Philip Bloom has been having fun with both the Sony RX10 II and RX100 IV this past few days. He has tested the slow motion and 4k modes extensively and has done a fantastic rundown of the usability, performance and pitfalls on using the cameras. There are a lot of interesting tidbits that He discovered such as the 240fps NTSC and 250fps PAL modes are nearly HD in quality and extremely usable very close to what the much more expensive Sony FS700 camera achieves.
When recording the 2 second quality priority mode it records back to the SD card in Real time that means a 2 second video at 240fps will take 20 seconds if saved as 24p for the frame count of 480 frames duration. At 480fps for 2 seconds of 960 frames it will take 40 seconds of write time to the SD card. This is in line with most slow motion cameras and it is a point to be considered while using the HFR modes. You will have to plan ahead as the camera will be unavailable for use for quite a long time before the next shot is ready to be taken. This is a normal thing in most high speed cameras.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Over the past week some footage from Sony and other real world uses has been surfacing. Many shows off the super slow motion modes and others tout the performance in 4k. The quality is for the most part good but not great and shows a clear aliasing and moire resolution loss at 480fps and 960fps. The codec at 50 Mbit is quite good and is not the weak link, the cameras suffer from line skipping as the readout frame rate increases to below 720p resolution in real terms while being saved on a 1080p wrapper.
We have compiled a series of footage samples found on the net for you to look at. Some are outright high speed samples and others are interface walk through samples. It should give a good idea of what quality we are talking about.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Samsung NX500 has just been updated with firmware 1.10 There are several improvements and like it’s larger sibling the NX1 now the slow motion mode of 120fps at 720p in this camera is more easily accessible. The NX1 has a better slow motion mode than the NX500 as it is 1080p Full HD instead of 720p but this camera is also much less expensive and has also 4k video. These enhancements add a lot of oomph to an already good pocket-able large sensor camera.
The biggest improvements are codec quality bit-rate up to 70Mbps and the large sensor readout for up to 60fps at full HD 1080p which reduces aliasing and moire in normal speed frame rates. It is rare for companies too add so much in firmware but it is encouraging to see Samsung not only try but constantly deliver useful firmware updates to their cameras. It shows they are serious for their camera imaging department.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
