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.