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.
The GoPro Like competitor project Mokacam on indiegogo has reached their goal 13x over or 1329% with over 660k USD by their backers. The project is just hours away from closing funding and a few of their offer kits are still available. If for anything it is a very cheap way to get into 4k at 15fps on a small GoPro like camera for under $200 USD with options for a tilt screen, pluggable magnetic batteries and even a portable electronic gimble for the tiny wonder of a camera.
What jumps out is how good the image quality is and all the surmounted obstacles that the team successfully accomplished to get the camera ready for production. It is not as strong in the frame rates as the GoPro Hero 4 black as it is only 15fps at 4k but it is not it’s function to eclipse that camera but to offer an alternative at a very low cost. It also offers a 1080p 60, 120fps 720p mode and a 240fps VGA mode hence why we are covering it as a high speed camera.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Fuji got quite a few products out at CES 2016 for photographers but nearly all had no real slow motion capabilities except for the Fuji XP90 Rugged waterproof compact camera. It is the same 16.4 Megapixel CMOS sensor with 5x optical zoom and a pretty standard 28mm lens at the wide end as last year’s Fuji XP80.
It is still shockproof from 6ft, waterproof to 50ft and freeze-proof down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. But aside from the harsh treatment capabilities the camera has a larger 3 inch screen vs 2.7″ on it’s predecessor and the 1080p video spec has been upped to 60p for a little slowdown.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Regardless of what the GoPro and Ambarella marriage can provide in tandem hardware it is clear the company wants to branch out of the fledgling sales of GoPro which have tanked in recent quarters and the stock price from a high near a $100 USD is now trading at a mere $12 which is half the IPO price. By branching out it seems they want their chips in many more imaging devices and be less affected by the GoPro product cycle.
The announced H2 and H12 chips are able to provide beefy 4k specs at high frame rates for mobile devices at a mere 2 Watts of power. As to 1080p frame rates it will remain to be seen how this powerful new chip can handle that in a camera design and how it is implemented to squeeze that performance. 120fps at 4k from the H2 in theory should be able to yield 480fps at 1080p just counting the Pixel processing. This however can be limited by the rest of the components like imaging sensor.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Another big set of releases at CES regarding cameras that have a slow motion mode fro the consumer are the Sony Handycam and Action cam models that were refreshed. The Sony FDR-AX53 is the most interesting of the two as it is probably the smallest and lightest Handycam from Sony that shoots 4k in a near professional quality level.
It offers so much for under 1k that it will pose some problems for other cameras in it’s segment. It is not as advanced in the zoom department as the Panasonic WXF991 which can ramp zoom and focus on dolly motion but it does have a jack of all trades feel about it.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Warning: The parent company of FPS cameras “The Slow Motion Camera Company Ltd.” went out of business and entered liquidation proceedings. No further development of cameras is expected. More information here on Google Search!
In the update released to day Graham Rowan the creator of the fps1000 high speed camera project has made it known that the camera body has passed EMC for both CE and FCC certification.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
