Hands on with Casio's Crazy High-speed Camera

By Sean Captain Posted 10.04.2007 at 10:04 am 4 Comments

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

4 Comments

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popsci

10/04/07 at 11:24 am

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

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popsci

10/05/07 at 7:44 am

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?

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popsci

01/06/08 at 9:42 pm

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

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popsci

01/07/08 at 10:04 am

@ 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.