Digital high speed cameras

[MIPS]

I finally checked "get a high speed camera and figure out reasons to justify buying one" off the bucket list and now I'm wading through a really strange world of professional imaging products and a lot of product holes.



Unit on the left is the Ektapro EM 1000. A low-end model solid state imaging system sold by Kodak in the early 90's for somewhere between $90k and $110000, depending on specs. Resolution of 192x239 at 1000fps and it crops vertically from there as you add memory and go up to 12000fps.

Unit on the right is a Motion Corder SR-1000. Mid-range solid-state recorder sold by Kodak but made by Photron. Sold in the mid to late 90's and was somewhere between $40K and $75K, depending on specs. The image sensor is a higher resolution but at 1000fps is more cropped than the EM machine.
In all, $300usd in stuff off ebay. For some reason both systems show up on a semi-regular basis either complete in parts for very cheap. IT gets mixed in with Ektapro slide projectors and parts.

They're fun. With on 1 second or so of capture time you don't have a lot to work with but once you get used to manual triggers its fine. As it turns out, taking the composite output, passing it through one of those cheap $5 composite to HDMI upscalers and recording that with a $25 HDMI capture dongle gave a really good picture given how much it had to upscale the image.
As you might expect though there's not a lot of other people out there who are avid high speed camera users. There's a few youtube channels using modern hardware and LOTS of people half-assing it with video cameras and post processing but I'm not seeing a lot of people who have collected multiple cameras aside from me and two other people. Actually I can't find a lot at all. Mostly scientific papers citing use, a few manuals and flyers and a few teardowns. Kodak had a few products at that time but they seem mostly undocumented. In fact, the only thing I can find that was available around the same time is from Redlake. Also prices have not improved terribly. The base price for a 1000fps camera running at 1280x1024 is still $4000. HD costs you another $2000 and the product range these imagers used to live in is still over $100000.

[MIPS]

Here is an example of video out of both imagers.
Now the big thing with both is that their preferred methods of unloading footage is quite obsolete these days, if not unsuitably slow. The EM-1000/1200 has options for IEEE-488/GPIB and composite video with direct VCR control. The SR-1000 gives you a SCSI interface to download images, plus composite video.
Because the image sensor resolution so amazingly small compared to the bandwidth of composite video it makes more sense today to download using that. For this reason I built a USB powered box that consists of three things:

1-A $5 Aliexpress Composite to HDMI converter and 1920x1080 upscaler
2-A $15 HDMI to USB capture dongle
3-Hot glue
The Capture dongle is driverless and appears in your video capture and editing program of choice, such as OBS.




The result is actually really good considering how low the initial resolution is. I had bigger issues with getting the cameras focused but I can assure you that is a problem with the glass and not representative of the best these can do.

First up is the EM-1000. The footage is of the mechanical locking mechanism in an older slot machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv2XjJ0qO_U



For the SR-1000 we have footage of a bird taking flight from the top of a fence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2YpqYVZUDw

Notice that while the SR-1000 is the newer system the capture window is considerably smaller.

[rld-tv01]

Great stuff. Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode where another universe intersects with ours but at a speed we can't perceive. Your high speed device might capture some unexpected things.

[rld-tv01]

Your bird video got me interested in what high speed camera can do. Here's a youtube commercial for high speed camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT-IMizhlWg