We're all likely familiar with Phantom's line of ultra-high-speed cameras. These cameras have been used to film the most viral "bullet-time," slow-motion sequences you've seen everywhere online, but scientists also love them for their ability to reveal otherwise-hidden, split-second reactions. Phantom recently announced a new camera that can record 6,600 frames per second at a nearly square 2,048 x 1,952 resolution. Only need full HD? The new V2640 scream through at 11,750 frames per second at 1920 x 1080.
Of course, recording at those frame rates requires extremely fast shutter speeds. At nearly 12,000 frames per second, even with zero delay between shots, the camera would have to take frames at least as fast as 1/12,000 s. Shooting that fast means you need a ton of light, which is why the V2640 shoots at ISO 3,200 in color or ISO 16,000 in a 1-megapixel monochrome mode that will go up to 25,030 frames per second.
All of that data requires storage speeds so fast that standard hard drives or even solid state drives cannot keep up. While the Phantom V2640 will take one- or two-terabyte SSDs to be able to offload the data, it uses up to 288 GB of RAM in order to sustain the incredibly high write speeds that it requires to shoot the 26 Gpx/s (i.e., 26.4 billion pixels every second) that you get by shooting 6,600 4-megapixel images per second.
What would you shoot with the new V2640?
They should have 3 or 4 slotted PCIe SSD drive slots that can be configured in any number of RAID arrays to stream the data off the internal RAM. That would probably buy you a fair amount of extra recording time before the buffer maxes out.
Price?