Most users who venture into the world of high-speed cameras have already tried capturing video with a home camcorder and observed that they cannot see the necessary details of the event under study because of motion blur or because the event was missed entirely. In many cases, the shutter speed and frame-rate can be determined fairly quickly by trial and error. But that assumes that the user already has a high-speed camera and can play around with it. What if you’re interested in acquiring a high-speed camera but don’t know which one to purchase based on frame-rate and shutter speed? In this four part series we will give you some insight in choosing the right solution.
Camera Choices:
USB3 Cameras
USB3 Vision provides further benefits which create leverage in the community to push for better conditions and reliability. Among other improvements, USB 3.0 adds a new transfer mode called "SuperSpeed" (SS), with theoretical transfer rate of 5 Gbit/s. The effective bandwidth is around 400 MByte/s. which is still 10 times faster than USB 2.0, and 5 times than 1394b (Firewire). A successor is under way called USB 3.1, which will provide speeds up to 10 Gbit/s (1.25 GB/s, called "SuperSpeed+") and thus easily surpassing the CameraLink interface.
- VGA Resolution
- 1/3” CMOS, Global Shutter
- 500 + fps
- Monochrome /Colour
Golf Swing Video Using a USB3 Camera
PCI Express high-speed cameras
Your application may require high resolution and high frame rate where the data transfer rate is critical. These PCIe cameras can deliver 20Mpixel at 33 frames per second or 12Mpixel at 100fps. The camera’s data and control interface are fully compliant with PCI Express External Cabling Specifications, which allows data throughput of more than 1700MB/sec over 300 meters - more than any other interface will be able to compete with.
Hand Held Portables
For applications that require 500fps to 20,000 fps there is quite a number of portable handheld solutions on the market. Choosing the right camera is dependent on recording time, resolution, frame rate, colour or mono, etc. Please refer to our range of
portable solutions. These High speed cameras are manufactured in one of the following two ways:
1) Capture high frame rates, usually between 500-20,000 fps for a shorter duration of time from 10 to 120 seconds. These types of cameras have internal SDRAM and the user downloads the video after the event is recorded.
*Demo Video*
2) Capture lower frame rates, usually between 120 and 1000 fps for a longer duration lasting several hours. These types of cameras have no internal SDRAM. They stream the live video to the PC’s hard drive. This will be considered more in our next article regarding recording software.
