Tuesday, June 4, 2013

High speed, high resolution, low price


High resolution cameras, by which I mean 12Mp and up, are expensive. In fact I recall the first 16Mp cameras working out at around $1,000 per megapixel. And as for framerates, well maybe 3fps was achievable.

How things change. I was recently alerted to a 12Mp camera from Emergent Vision Technologies of Coquitlam, British Columbia, which runs at 87.5 frames per second. Best of all, the HS-12000 is priced around $5,000, so that’s a lot of pixels and a torrent of data bits per second.

Key to this performance are a CMOSIS sensor with 5.5 m pixels, (yes, it takes an F-mount lens,) and a 10GigE interface. 10GigE is rather like honest politicians: I’ve heard of such a thing but I’ve never actually seen one.

So this is all rather exciting. Emergent’s location provides another interesting twist too. Coquitlam, British Columbia is less than five miles east of Burnaby B.C., which was home to Prosilica, (subsequently the Canadian arm of AVT.) And Burnaby is five miles east of Richmond B.C., home to Point Grey.

Anyone care to take a bet on where the next Canadian camera maker will come from? Port Moody looks a good bet.

1 comment:

Birgit said...

Any experience with those?
In fact, any experience with other 10GigE so far?