Excellent tear down! I love seeing old specialist equipment like this. It's amazing how far we've come, today this entire system could easily be built into something half the size of the camera head. I wasn't expecting a CCD sensor. I guess CMOS tech wasn't up to the task at the time. I was also expecting the RAM to take up much more space, but it was quite small. I'm surprised they didn't use PC memory modules as well.
>"It's amazing how far we've come, today this entire system could easily be built into something half the size of the camera head." Hi, it's 2021 now and we have phones which can record at 2,000 fps in 720p! Oh and they record in full colour and don't even need external lighting for most shots. It's crazy how far camera tech has come. I really hope we see IR sensors going up in resolution and down in value, it'd be great to have an affordable high resolution IR camera on my phone.
Hi Mike. In our flat we don't have cable. There's no Sky dish either but I don't care that we cant get The Discovery Channel.... We've got YOUR channel ! Love it.
Re. memory modules,. It could be that the design pre-dated availability of suitably fast modules, and there may also have been robustness concerns. Could also have been the width wasn't a good fit. Early kodak desitgns used an NMOS sensor, but I think this one is CCD judging by the drivers
It's about the same res at 1000fps - slightly higher at other resolutions, but less memory. The intensified image on the old system is handy, but this one is a lot smaller and more convenient to use.
I have an early Video Logic Instar high speed camera system that records to a reel of one inch tape if you want it. 200fps max and uses a vidicon tube.
An excellent teardown followed by some excellent high speed clips, thanks (: Nice to see the bleed on the coin spin, gives me a fairly good idea of the lighting requirements (assuming all the high speed used the two 20w halogens)
Boards are in production for that (finally), should be here in a couple of weeks. I'm also getting around to doing proper enclosed version of my old 640x480 camera, I don't see anyone making a budget high speed camera, so I figure I'll give it a go. It should sell for well under $1k.
Is there a fault or an adjustment that needs to be made to deal with high brightness, whenever a metallic object reflected light back at the camera there was a huge chunk of noise on the image. Maybe you need a soft filter on the lighting?
The supply for the auxiliary lights might be dead because it was run with no load. The oscillator design that most of them use will fry without a proper load as the load is needed to keep them stable.
Amazing slo-mo stuff, Mike! I LOVE the idea of using gooseneck mic holders for lighting rigs, might have to borrow that idea for some of my photography work :D
I've never bought hardware like this on ebay.. but I'm managed to buy high value parts like FPGAs from ebay for a lot less than their normal price a few times. You just have to keep searching until a decent deal turns up. I search every other day to see if any big SRAMs turn up for example.
It's probably sad that I recognised the duck! The same colour changing duck I bought my wife where the battery NEVER needs replacing... until it does and you have to cut and pry the thing out :) - Liked the wood drilling. Looking forward to seeing what uses you come up with for the two cameras (is enough balloon pops etc on youtube). Does this make your previous high speed camera you fixed up obsolete?
No, that wouldn't work. The limitation is DRAM. When recording, the data goes directly to RAM because it's the only thing capable of taking that much data that quickly (at least at the time). Nowadays you could send this over Thunderbolt or USB3.0 directly into a computer's memory and get ages of recording time. Just like with his old high-speed camera (which he did a great write-up on reverse engineering on his website) you could, given enough time, reverse-engineer this and either add a lot more DRAM or just have it send the data to an FPGA which routes the data through Thunderbolt/USB/cable of your choice. Even Wi-Fi would be fast enough nowadays!
"Can't actually see a spec on that" The part number on it pretty much says it all: BTU12-3.3S16A. 12V in, 3.3V out, 16A. Not entirely sure what the S stands for.
There are SO many more things you would need to know. What is the data format? What is the maximum baud rate (determined by cable length)? Can the camera chip support compression (Which many modern chips do)? Are you bound to RS-232 or is there another protocol you can use?
That's because you can't *look* for stuff. You have to use saved searches with email notifications. It's the only way to get the cool stuff because it sells fast.
You also need to be clever with your saved searches. Searching for misspelled manufacturers' names is a good one, because you find people who don't really know what they're selling.
Jealous.... Around here, rental on a camera of that frame rate is >200 pounds/day. It is amazing to watch a large mechanical system at those frame rates, seeing what feel like very rigid structures going all wobbly.. Hell even just cutting a piece of taught string is amusing.
I just picked up one of these machines with the camera, extra lens, carry case, instruction manual, and everything if anyone is interested. strobe Light, wires, sony video cam corder. Looking to sell it.
It would be cool if they remade that with the new HD ratio format as well as the high speed. That would make the best video camera in the world if they did that and it would be the standard for fast movement HD broadcasting.
