World’s Fastest Camera: Six Million+ Frames Per Second

World’s fastest camera – Nature

The camera technique, known as serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM), can take an image every 163 nanoseconds — a rate roughly six times as fast as the best digital video cameras on the market. Although its current resolution is only about 2,500 pixels, that can probably be improved, says Keisuke Goda, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the authors on the paper, which appears today in Nature.

A nanosecond is one billionth of a second, so one frame every 163 nanoseconds equals about 6,134,969 frames per second.  Fast.  Amazingly, the camera was built with off-the-shelf parts from the fiber optics industry, according to the article.

The referenced article claims such a camera could be helpful in the study of combustion, laser cutting and “any system that changes quickly and unpredictably.”  I read “combustion” as explosions, which sounds more exciting.

I am reminded of some very high-speed exposures shot by multiple “Rapatronic” cameras during atomic bomb testing in the 1950s.  Groups of these cameras were pointed at the detonation site and each took a single photo with exposure times as short as 10 nanoseconds.  The pictures are awesome and spooky.

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