consumer high speed cameras

[Philippe Malcolm]

Dear colleagues,
I was wondering if anyone could advise on what are currently good consumer high-speed cameras?

In the past I have worked a lot with the EX-F1 from Casio and I had the impression that a lot of other biomechanics labs were using this camera. However, it is no longer available except on ebay and I would assume that it must have been surpassed in performance by more recent cameras (I may be wrong here).

I would be interested to know what are the latest equivalent models with the following specifications:
- Easy to use consumer camera
- Frame rate up to at least 100 frames per seconds
- Good sensitivity allowing to film in normal daylight without need for additional light sources
- Possibility to mount on a tripod
- Preferably no fish-eye lens

Thanks a lot for your responses,
Philippe

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Philippe Malcolm, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Biodesign Lab & Wyss institute
(Starting from 2017: Department of Biomechanics - University of Nebraska Omaha)
website: http://scholar.harvard.edu/pmalcolm/
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[Paul S Glazier]

Re: consumer high speed cameras

Check out the Sony RX100 IV - http://www.sony.com/electronics/cybe...as/dsc-rx100m4

I believe the Sony RX100 V is due out shortly.

[Manvendra Singh]

Re: consumer high speed cameras

What resolution and Interface you are looking for? Color or Mono? Check https://www.ptgrey.com/blackfly-s-13...emi-python1300 . With lenses and required accessories for synchronization, this would still be cheaper than consumer cameras and would offer much more features for serious application like Biomechanics.

[Bill Sellers]

Re: consumer high speed cameras

The Fujifilm HS50 EXR has almost identical high speed filming specifications to the Casio EX-F1 and was available until very recently. I would think you could still find it. The Fujifilm FinePix S1 looks like its successor and films up to 480 fps - but I haven't used that one. There's also the S9900W which also seems to cope with 480 fps. All of these cameras get progressively worse resolution as the filming speed goes up but they are very easy to use and very affordable.

Cheers
Bill
--
Bill Sellers, Tel: 01612751719, Mob: 07857655786, http://www.animalsimulation.org
University of Manchester, D1239 Michael Smith Building, Manchester, M13 9PT.

[Philipp Ruß]

Re: consumer high speed cameras

Dear Malcolm,

In principle I would agree with Manvendra that many industrial high speed camera today, especially with new sensors and USB3 interface allow for much better performance to an even cheaper or equal price to a good consumer camera. However one must not forget the system architecture that is needed with these cameras. If you want to record multiple of them together you need cabling, PC that is able to manage all the incoming data, professional software for multi high speed camera recording, etc… which makes the system as a whole to function well much more expensive than just the camera. I think the most limiting factor with most of the professional high speed camera solutions, even though they provide great data quality, is the cables when you go into sport testing (wiring a stadium, etc..). This is why we at Simi right now also work on complete wireless high speed camera solutions. They will be released soon and will record full high speed videos in industrial quality without the need for cables in a multiple camera setting.

If you want to use consumer cameras like GoPros, etc.. within latest software there is a few solutions to get around former problems. For example Simi Motion includes correction of lens distortion for any camera (for data and visual correction). The new image processing pipe allows editing brightness, gamma and contrast in multiple rows after recording. So it doesn’t matter so much if your original video was quite dark or didn’t provide enough contrast, since you can change it afterwards.

The most recent tracking possibilities of markerless tracking provide a completely new base of using normal cameras. You get full 3D motion capture data automatically by just filming with normal cameras. If you compare with the work you did for the Olympic high jumpers in Belgium, results would have been available just the same training session. We have tested accuracy of the method both with professional industrial high speed solutions and with normal cameras like GoPros. Please find the corresponding thesis here http://www.simi.com/fileadmin/user_u...era_setups.pdf
This work shows you get quite good markerless 3D Motion capture results by using GoPros compared to high speed solutions for markerless tracking or marker based tracking. Of course not the same quality, but still quite ok when looking at the price differences.