OT- Now THAT'S a Camera!

[garagemark]

I know very little about cameras, but this article caught my eye. A TRILLION frames per SECOND!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16163931

I cannot add more to this, but I know some of you guys are camera buffs and might be able to be either impressed by it, or to pick it apart.

Mark

[PixMan]

I dunno about that.

I'm skeptical because I know of no electronics nor mechanical device capable of those speeds. I do however know of the students at MIT constantly striving to execute greater and greater hoaxes and stunts to impress their professors.

[jkopel]

not quite

If you read the article, or better yet look at the actual research (http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/) you will see that they are not capturing at those rates. They are repeating a scan millions of times and recreating and "event" by analyzing those scans.

Pretty amazing for visualizing the propagation of light, not so good for shooting a bullet through an apple.

[Jaakko Fagerlund]

They say it is fast, but they obviously don't own a cat

[Evan]

It isn't quite what it seems. It doesn't actually take images at a rate of a trillion frames per second. It takes images that are illuminated by lasers pulses a trillionth of a second long. It is capable of being triggered with picosecond accuracy (1 trillionth of a second). It then takes images at a very slow rate of perhaps several seconds per image with the trigger timing altered by as little as a picosecond each time. These images are then assembled into a movie where each subsequent frame shows the position of the picosecond long light pulse one picosecond later than the previous pulse.

Also, the movie shown is a single image taken in full colour with a regular camera and then combined (stacked) with the illumination value of the laser pulse. Since the laser used is green it cannot produce a colour image.

I have left out the part about how it captures the individual scan lines but the fact is that it really doesn't operate at a trillion frames per second. It doesn't even take a single frame in a trillionth of a second, just one scan line every 13 nanoseconds which comes out to one 500 line frame in 6.5 microseconds. The object must be entirely stationary during the process. If events are to be photographed they must be precisely repeatable millions of times.

It took about an hour to take enough shots to make a final video representing a fraction of a second of real time, leading one member of the team to dub the equipment "the world's slowest fastest camera".

BTW, an ordinary Canon point and shoot camera can be reprogrammed to take an image with a shutter speed of 30 millionths of a second (30 microseconds).

[aostling]

A TRILLION frames per SECOND!

That is a calculated rate, somewhat misleading. The imagery is not formed by successive exposures each of one picosecond duration. It is impressive, though, and time will tell what applications result.

[aostling]

BTW, an ordinary Canon point and shoot camera can be reprogrammed to take an image with a shutter speed of 30 millionths of a second (30 microseconds).

I'd like to see the results of that with the camera digiscoped, pointing at the sun. That should be fast enough to not blow out the highlights.

[WCPenney]

Interesting note. The light is traveling at, well, the speed of light. Time stops at the speed of light. As far as the light is concerned, the experiment never happened. Repeatedly

[arcs_n_sparks]

Just a streak camera that is repeatedly tweaked to capture a slightly different view. Requires a repeatable phenomena. Perhaps useful, but most things I am aware of for high speed cameras are one-shot affairs.

[Rustybolt]

They're using it to track laser light through some sort of medium. I'm assuming(silly me) that the medium is slowing the light down.

[H380]

From the horses mouth. The MIT News office. This is really cool. Especially the medical scanning potential.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXg...pGS439mjVLfpfV

[macona]

Just a streak camera that is repeatedly tweaked to capture a slightly different view. Requires a repeatable phenomena. Perhaps useful, but most things I am aware of for high speed cameras are one-shot affairs.

Like this:

[Evan]

That's about the coolest thing I have seen in a while.

[Evan]

BTW, what code are you using to embed flash? Something changed recently and I can't get it to work.

[elf]

Anybody can make a video and say it's a trillion frames per second. Here's one I did: http://www.efrench.members.winisp.ne...XTheMovie3.wmv