Hands on with Casio's Crazy High-speed Camera

While in Tokyo for CEATEC, I made the pilgrimage to Casio headquarters and geeked out at their museum. I saw the world's first electronic calculator (about the size of a toaster oven) and also the first digital camera with—if you can believe it—an LCD screen on the back.

But my real purpose was to meet with the father of that old camera, Jin Nakayama, to see his latest offspring. It's so new, in fact, they haven’t chosen a name yet. But it’s the wildest camera I've ever seen. By mating a high-performance CMOS image sensor with a new, lightening-fast processor, the camera can shoot up to 60 (yes, 60) six-megapixel photos per second or—get this—300 video frames per second. That’s National Geographic-style slow-mo video from a consumer camera. Well, if Casio goes ahead and builds a consumer camera. For now, it’s just a science experiment. But the prototype I saw looks pretty darn close to a real product.

Enough talking. If a picture's worth a thousand words, this 300-picture-per-second clip of me drinking water is the Magna Carta.—Sean Captain

Comments

[Some Guy]

do you have a video to upload? 10x slo-mo would be awesome on a consumer camera.

[Just Another Engineer]

Okay, sign me up. Every physics teacher in the US will want one of these as well. Any idea at a possible time frame for release and/or MRP?

[Ma Mary]

I want one now more than I want an upgrade to my Nikon D70s.

[1001 noisy cameras]

@ Just Another Engineer, it is expected to be released in March 2008, with a list price of $1000 (one thousand dollars).

The Japanese sites report a starting monthly production output of 10,000 units, so we could have some an interesting supply/demand situation if the early reviews are positive.

[Chris Keay]

is the shutter speed fast enough to freeze motion and stop blur? and 300 fps is ok but from my experience that may not be fast enough for many physics applications