The Cellar - Brilliant Camera Hack

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Take a part from a home projector, put it in a consumer camera, and you can take 400-frame-per-second video and high-resolution stills at the same time

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They used the chip's mirrors as a selective shutter, chopping up every frame of video captured by the camera into 16 lower-resolution frames. In this way, they were able to squeeze 400 frames per second out of the 25 frames per second the camera was designed to record.

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... research-grade high-speed detectors costing £60,000 typically have comparably few pixels. "And the mirror array can be bought for a few hundred pounds."

By using an array with even more mirrors it's possible to boost the frame rate even further – albeit with further losses in resolution. The team's latest setup can capture high-speed movies at over 6000 frames per second.

It's combining the hi-res stills with the superfast video that is really clever.