LabTechphys

Greetings! I'm a lab tech for physics department that does motion capture of objects falling and accelerating. We have some old firewire cameras that are falling out of use and compatibility, and we are looking to replace them. Searching for cameras with live streaming and recordings with high frame rates, it seems that my only options are network cameras or really expensive cameras for industrial processes. So, I was wondering if anyone on here could point me in the direction of an IP camera that could be used with both mac and pc computers that supports frame rates over 60fps. Regards

Thanks James, I'll look into it further. Recently I've been looking at some on-board camera modules that sparkfun have available on their website. I see that some of their camera specs offer higher frame rates at a loss of resolution, which is ok for our application. I just ordered a few different types to try them out. the place is a hobbyist electronics site, and as such, require a fair amount of setup do not include housings or external optics options. None-the less, we'll see if they will fulfill our needs. They are certainly far cheaper than the machine vision camera systems I was looking at last week. The cheapest quote I got on a class set (10x camera systems) was just north of 10k, and that did not include the new computers we would have to buy to support the video capture cards. It seems kinda frustrating that we fall in a strange area where we certainly dont need the high frame rate and quality of machine vision cameras, while the only other real alternatives are low quality web camera systems mostly maxing out at 30fps. Essentially we need cameras with a frame rate between 80fps and 200fps, and funny enough we found out that newer Iphone cameras are capable of over 150fps with a "slow-motion" mode. This would solve our problem right out if students all had their own, but not only do we not rest in an area gifted with an abundance of wealth, it would be unfair to expect students to have a 600$ item for lab to run. We have tried to replicate results with android phones to no avail. If I was more electronics savvy, I'd purchase the raw camera modules and wire them up to raspi or something. Oh well, the hunt continues.

Try a Google search for machine vision cameras. You will find a number a types of cameras there with frames rates up to and beyond 500fps Will not be cheap though Ilkie Thanks Ilkie. I'll do some shopping around with those key words. Someone else suggested I look for cameras with "sports" settings and "slow motion" options. Regards

myiicu, Thank you for the reply. These seem like very nice cameras, however I dont feel they fit our needs properly. They are certainly out of our price range, and include many specs we dont need such as movement controls, size, robust housing and more. I suppose what I was hoping to track down was something more webcam size that is suitable for light indoor use, can be connected to a computer via Ethernet cable, and has either enough sensitivity or a high enough frame rate to capture objects with minimal blur or drag as they are accelerated in a variety of means. We are trying to capture motion, essentially, in physics classrooms. Regards