High-speed digital camera

A high-speed camera is a device capable of capturing moving images with exposures of less than 1/1,000 second or frame rates in excess of 250 frames per second. It is used for recording fast-moving objects as photographic images onto a storage medium. After recording, the images stored on the medium can be played back in slow motion. Early high-speed cameras used film to record the high-speed events, but were superseded by entirely electronic devices using either a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a CMOS active pixel sensor, recording typically over 1,000 frames per second onto DRAM, to be played back slowly to study the motion for scientific study of transient phenomena. A high-speed camera can be classified as:

A normal motion picture film is played back at 24 frames per second, while television uses 25 frames/s (PAL) or 29.97 frames/s (NTSC). High-speed film cameras can film up to a quarter of a million frames per second by running the film over a rotating prism or mirror instead of using a shutter, thus reducing the need for stopping and starting the film behind a shutter which would tear the film stock at such speeds. Using this technique one second of action can be stretched to more than ten minutes of playback time (super slow motion). High-speed video cameras are widely used for scientific research, military test and evaluation, and industry. Examples of industrial applications are filming a manufacturing line to better tune the machine, or in the car industry filming a crash test to investigate the effect on the crash dummy passengers and the automobile. Today, the digital high-speed camera has replaced the film camera used for Vehicle Impact Testing.

Television series such as MythBusters and Time Warp often use high-speed cameras to show their tests in slow motion. Saving the recorded high-speed images can be time consuming because as of 2017^[update], consumer cameras have resolutions up to four megapixels with frame rates of over 1,000 per second which will record at a rate of 11 gigabytes per second. Technologically these cameras are very advanced, yet saving images requires use of slower standard video-computer interfaces. While recording is very fast, saving images is considerably slower. To reduce the storage space required and the time required for people to examine a recording, only the parts of an action which are of interest or relevance can be selected to film. When recording a cyclical process for industrial breakdown analysis, only the relevant part of each cycle is filmed.

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