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The edgertronic camera was designed to fill a huge hole in the high speed video camera market. Currently, at one end of the market are consumer cameras where h

The edgertronic camera was designed to fill a huge hole in the high speed video camera market. Currently, at one end of the market are consumer cameras where high speed is basically an afterthought (there's only so much you can do with a rolling shutter). At the other end are the ultra high end cameras used for big buck productions that cost $250K and up. The edgertronic has a global shutter and all the other specialized design features that make it a straight up high speed video camera. We could have come out with a camera that's faster/higher resolution but it would cost more. Just like with cars: "Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?" This camera strikes a nice balance between price and performance. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1521768569/edgertronictm-the-first-affordable-high-speed-vide https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1521768569/edgertronict... Mike

reportingsjr 13y ago
Can you guys tell us more hardware specs like the processor/fpga (I would assume fpga?), sensor (pixel count, pixel pitch), ram size and speed, etc? Wondering if it would be possible to cool the sensor to lower the noise floor and thus require less light. Will you guys also allow programming of the fpga for image processing and other uses? Appreciate it! Edit: Also, why 100Mbps Ethernet?? Almost all networks are GigE and with the frame rate you guys are talking about it could use the faster speed!
- sbierwagen 13y ago
  Also, why 100Mbps Ethernet?? 1.) It records to SD card. Ethernet is just used for live preview, not production footage. 2.) The bottleneck is the internal buffer. (and H.264 encoding) Gigabit ethernet wouldn't be fast enough to stream uncompressed high-speed video. Upgrading to either 10 gigabit ethernet (expensive!) or realtime 1000FPS H.264 encoding (really expensive!) would break the $5,000 budget. cool the sensor to lower the noise floor and thus require less light Difficult... A high speed camera obviously has to have very short exposure times in order to work at all. (Can't get faster than 2FPS with a 1/2s exposure time) The general rule of thumb is that you can trade off one "stop" in either direction-- 1/100, f/4, ISO200 is the same as 1/50 f/5.6 ISO200 is the same as 1/100, f/5.6, ISO400. My guess is that even with heroic cooling (liquid nitrogen) you'd only get from the usual wildly excessive lighting needed for high-speed cameras, down to merely "really bright." You'd never get to a point where you can light a scene with just indoor lighting.
  - edgertronic 13y ago
    sbierwagon, Thanks for the excellent response to reportingjr. You beat me to it. I spent a lot of time making the edgertronic a balanced design. All the parts work well together. On the computers we've tested with, the speed of the web browser and cpu/graphics processor is the bottleneck, not the ethernet. I did look at GigE but it would have increased cost, size, and power without adding any real benefit. With this type of sensor, cooling won't measurably improve noise. We'll design other cameras in the future, but we had to start somewhere, and this is it.

reportingsjr 13y ago

Can you guys tell us more hardware specs like the processor/fpga (I would assume fpga?), sensor (pixel count, pixel pitch), ram size and speed, etc? Wondering if it would be possible to cool the sensor to lower the noise floor and thus require less light. Will you guys also allow programming of the fpga for image processing and other uses? Appreciate it! Edit: Also, why 100Mbps Ethernet?? Almost all networks are GigE and with the frame rate you guys are talking about it could use the faster speed!

sbierwagen 13y ago
Also, why 100Mbps Ethernet?? 1.) It records to SD card. Ethernet is just used for live preview, not production footage. 2.) The bottleneck is the internal buffer. (and H.264 encoding) Gigabit ethernet wouldn't be fast enough to stream uncompressed high-speed video. Upgrading to either 10 gigabit ethernet (expensive!) or realtime 1000FPS H.264 encoding (really expensive!) would break the $5,000 budget. cool the sensor to lower the noise floor and thus require less light Difficult... A high speed camera obviously has to have very short exposure times in order to work at all. (Can't get faster than 2FPS with a 1/2s exposure time) The general rule of thumb is that you can trade off one "stop" in either direction-- 1/100, f/4, ISO200 is the same as 1/50 f/5.6 ISO200 is the same as 1/100, f/5.6, ISO400. My guess is that even with heroic cooling (liquid nitrogen) you'd only get from the usual wildly excessive lighting needed for high-speed cameras, down to merely "really bright." You'd never get to a point where you can light a scene with just indoor lighting.
- edgertronic 13y ago
  sbierwagon, Thanks for the excellent response to reportingjr. You beat me to it. I spent a lot of time making the edgertronic a balanced design. All the parts work well together. On the computers we've tested with, the speed of the web browser and cpu/graphics processor is the bottleneck, not the ethernet. I did look at GigE but it would have increased cost, size, and power without adding any real benefit. With this type of sensor, cooling won't measurably improve noise. We'll design other cameras in the future, but we had to start somewhere, and this is it.