Dedicated super slow-motion cameras are great for a whole load of uses, from reviewing fast-paced game footage to watching high-speed objects move in deliberate fashion. They’re especially useful for mad scientists who need to capture their experiments in excruciating detail. The high ticket prices for such cameras, however, keep them out of most people’s reach. While the Edgertronic isn’t exactly cheap, it does bring high-FPS video capture to the hands of mad scientists with moderate funds for world domination.
Created by a pair of MIT-trained engineers, it’s an affordable professional-quality super slow-motion camera engineered from the ground up using custom hardware and software. Not only is it cheaper than your standard high-FPS rig, it’s a heck of a lot smaller, too, making it a whole lot more convenient to carry around while conducting experiments on the other side of your secret island laboratory.
The Edgertronic houses a specialized CMOS image sensor, image processing electronics, and storage housed inside an anodized aluminum enclosure measuring just 4.4 x 4.3 x 3.1 inches. The front of the camera sports a Nikon F-mount lens (it ships with the 50mm F1.8 D), while the rear holds a smattering of ports (two USB, one Ethernet, one audio, and one accessory expansion IO where you can connect peripherals like an external trigger). It can shoot in 4,130 different resolution/fps combos — H.264 video at 494 fps in the highest resolution setting (1280 x 1020 pixels) and a ridiculous 17,791 fps at the lowest (192 x 96 pixels), with everything buffered (8 seconds on average) before being forwarded to the removable SD card. Features include exposures down to 1/200,000 seconds, ISO 100-400 sensitivity, and a browser-based control panel once hooked up to a computer.
Pricing for the Edgertronic starts at $4,895. It’s currently a fully-funded project on Kickstarter. If you don’t quite make it to the pledging round (just a few hours to go as of this writing), you can go straight to the company website to find other purchase options.