A bit fishy?

The last few years have seen amazing growth in camera resolution. When I started blogging I consider a 1600 x 1200, 2Mp sensor to be my “standard.” Now 5Mp is my standard, and I’m looking forwards to the day when I use a 29Mp camera for everything.

But frame rates haven’t kept up, with the result that some of these wonderful new cameras can’t be used in their target applications because they don’t run fast enough. So it’s good to see that manufacturers such as AVT are trying to correct this growing problem.

The Bonito, from AVT, is a 4Mp camera that runs at up to 386fps, full frame. Now that’s what I call fast. Of course, it takes a bundle of cables as thick as my arm to handle all those bits of data, but boy does it move a whole lot of ‘em! Kudos to AVT for giving us such a toy.

But here’s where things got strange. AVT has long used fish names for their cameras, with the exception of the GigE ones that grew out of the Prosilica acquisition. Pike, Guppy, Marlin and so on all fit that convention, but Bonito? I’m no fisherman, so I turned to Google.

Bonito, or so I learned, is Spanish for nice. It’s also Portuguese for beautiful, (so a beautiful Portuguese woman is merely ‘nice’ in Spain?) but these didn’t fit the fishy theme, so I dove deeper.

Wikipedia had the answer: a Bonito is a “medium-sized, predatory fish in the Scombridae family.” So there we have it, sanity and camera naming convention restored.

Of course, knowing Wikipedia, a Bonito could just be a brand of rubber glove sold in Venezuela …