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.
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 ←
The Nexus 6P has had a rough start due to it’s somewhat lackluster build quality that buckled on the bend tests against the improved iPhone 6s which fixed that problem that appeared on the iPhone 6. However that does not detract from the fact that the Nexus 6P is a serious powerhouse of specs and camera performance which brings true competition at 120fps and 240fps quality against the iPhone hegemony.
The compression has been improved and the scaling is actually pretty good generating fewer artifacts than ever before on an Android Phone slow motion mode. While there is a bit of Moire and aliasing in the images especially at 240fps, it is in line to what the iPhone 6s delivers. That is why we ranked them side by side on our best slow motion cameras of 2015.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
DJI Has announced a portable 3-Axis Gimbal camera system called DJI OSMO that rivals the best handheld camera options from the competition with an integrated ZENMUSE X3 camera “Same as the one found in the DJI Inspire 1 drone. You get a ton of standard features like an intelligent panning mode and auto panorama with also a timelapse & intervalometer to boot. You will need to supply a Phone or other portable device with iOS or Android in order to have a live preview screen and set up the camera / adjust settings.
Specs for the DJI OSMO portable stabilized camera:
Video Resolution:
UHD: 4K (4096 x 2160) 24/25p
UHD 4K (3840 x 2160) 24/25/30p
2.7K (2704 x 1520) 24/25/30p
FHD: 1920 x 1080 24/25/30/48/50/60/120p*
HD: 1280 x 720 24/25/30/48/50/60p
Sensor:
Sony Exmor R CMOS; 1/2.3”
Effective pixels: 12.40M
(Total pixels: 12.76M)
Still Photography Modes:
Single Shot
Photo Burst Mode: 3/5/7 shots
Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB):
3/5 bracketed frames @ 0.7EV bias
Interval
Timelapse
Auto Panorama
Selfie Panorama
