First shots with the early bird camera!

[gyppor]

I'm not going to say "first", because I'm not a... crap, I've already said it.

Well, I picked up my camera yesterday and quickly got to testing.

I think backers will be very pleasantly surprised at the image quality, build quality, and sensitivity of the camera. IT feels like a production-ready product including excellent packaging.

Here are a couple of shots ranging from 1500 to 38,000 fps. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/BT-22GP8Zlw

Gyppor

 

[JamesB]

Well done, excellent quality from the sensor. Can't wait to get mine! 

 

[gyppor]

Moderator, is it ok to post videos in this forum? Or will you add a sub-forum for this purpose?

Here's another one. frame rates used are 4300, 5900 and 10200. Image quality is still great.

The manual lens is awesome as it allows focus and aperture adjustment on the fly. As the wasp flew back and forth inside the container I had to adjust the focus, even though it was on ly 6" deep. I could not do this on the Sony RX10-ii I used before this.

Awesome work, Kron Tech, I still can't believe how incredible this camera is.

https://youtu.be/w4PF5hRfCA8

Gyppor

 

[tesla500]

Moderator, is it ok to post videos in this forum? Or will you add a sub-forum for this purpose?

Here's another one. frame rates used are 4300, 5900 and 10200. Image quality is still great.

The manual lens is awesome as it allows focus and aperture adjustment on the fly. As the wasp flew back and forth inside the container I had to adjust the focus, even though it was on ly 6" deep. I could not do this on the Sony RX10-ii I used before this.

Awesome work, Kron Tech, I still can't believe how incredible this camera is.

https://youtu.be/w4PF5hRfCA8

Gyppor

Great shots! Go right ahead, use this board for now, if we get a lot of demo shots we'll add another board for them.

 

[gyppor]

Testing the limits of the camera:

exposure at 1 microsecond

https://youtu.be/MPaA4Dks3To

highest frame rate with VERY fast events (38,565fps)

click beetle:
https://youtu.be/R6-_gXddgGU

Party popper propellant charge:
https://youtu.be/oGOM2acRom4

The quality in both cases is quite degraded, but useable for scientific and entertainment/educational applications.

Gyppor

 

[DerpyKv]

Quite interesting, I personally have not used the camera for anything other they controlled scientific events.
The flag is quite interesting, especially how you can see the waves going through it.

Cheers,
Max

 

[gyppor]

Here's another one. Really liking the camera... a LOT... 

Tiny bees playing leaf blower with some pollen, slowed down 155 times (4653fps):

https://youtu.be/ckwfTcNMbv4

And as a bonus, a cherry tomato blowing up at 6600fps:

https://youtu.be/7dE0Vh5DnSI

Very good image quality at these frame rates, I'm impressed.

G

 

[nik282000]

Very cool footage, I was hoovering it up as you started posting the other day.

This is literally the first thing I got it pointed at since opening the box. The bottle is full of steam which condenses back to water leaving a strong vacuum that then draws in the water, 800x420 @ 4k-ish fps. I still need to spend a lot of time practicing getting colour and exposure correct. I also need to replace my now-exploded home depot LED light, apparently they don't like 1.41x their rated voltage even for a short period of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRDdCLMIkvk

 

[nik282000]

It was bright enough to do some outdoor shooting today, good think I had plenty of cold beer.

https://youtu.be/Y0Nxhfqi9WI

 

[Simon]

What's the softness due to in most high speed videos I see?

Say for instance this loseless screengrab of the raw ducks mp4:

Link as forum software appears to scale up: http://i.imgur.com/FFM7luc.png

Is it from:

• mp4 compression?
• quality of lens?
• insufficient lighting for faster exposure?
• focus?

The duck at the back is obviously blurrier due to depth of field.

Or is this typical of normal shots in cameras before the camera sharpens?

 

[jefish]

I'm really hoping it's the lens.

 

[tesla500]

The softness is due mainly to the lens, followed by the demosaic algorithm. The shot you picked is one of the sharper ones, and is limited more by the demosaic than the lens I believe, especially for the duck in the center. The ones at the edge are more focus limited due to the lens, and possibly motion blur. The current bilinear demosaic does introduce some softness. A much sharper AHD demosaic is on the roadmap, and of course with RAW saving the demosaic is up to the user in post. It will never be as sharp as the monochrome camera however, some loss of sharpness is intrinsic to Bayer filter cameras, but with a good demosaic it can be almost as good as mono for most shots.

 

[Simon]

Oh yeah, the demosaic - forgot about that since I ordered the monochrome.

No rush for the sharper demosaic 

Thanks.

 

[gyppor]

The computar 12.5-75 lens is very soft at f/1.2, much better at f/2, and way way better at f/4 and above. Youtube also absolutely butchers image quality, when I saw the first images out of my own camera I was blown away by the difference.

It's also hard to get the focus right at telephoto focal lengths with close up shots because the depth of field get very very shallow. I was filming a wasp from 1m away in a 10cm diameter glass vase, and if I focused on it on the far side of the glass, it would be totally out of focus when on the near side.

For now I can definitely live with a few flaws because that one lens does almost everything I want. It's nice not to have to swap lenses.

 

[Simon]

Just plugged those numbers (75 cm focal length, f/4, subject 1 m away) into the depth of field calculator at http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dof-calculator.htm , using a sensor size of 1/2.3" (closest preset I could see) and you've got just a mere 0.7 cm depth of field. That's assuming you're viewing the image on a monitor with ample resolution at 10" wide from a distance of 10".  Not 100% confident my assumptions are correct, but wow if they are.

That's a bit eye opening actually (no pun intended) - at least for me. Smaller sensors can get subject isolation from the background at much narrow apertures, optimizing the sharper middle ranges of zooms. Just need tons more light.