Hi everyone. Today's video is a good old-fashioned unboxing of a
Kickstarter-funded high-speed camera from Kron Technology of Canada.
I ordered the camera about nine months ago after watching a review of a late
model prototype on the EEVBlog. For me there are three justifications. The first
is that the technology and David Kronstein's story, the creator's story, is
fantastic. The second is that I'm fascinated by
technologies tht enhance our senses such as extreme timelapse, thermal,
hyper-spectral and now high-speed video. Finally, unique tools tend to attract
unique jobs to pay for the tools. I ordered the monochrome 16 gigabyte
version. 16 gigabyte to give eight seconds of recording and monochrome to have
greater light sensitivity and probably greater fidelity since it won't have
color filter in front of the sensor. It's got a lot of foam, packing list, user
manual with version 0.2 of the software, cable, camcorder battery, wall adapter, hex wrench,
and the camera. Okay, so I hadn't intended to open the box up quite yet
because I know that I want to spend a lot of time learning how to use this
camera and there's other work that I have to get done. But Kron Technology
contacted me they said please open a box up and verify its contents. And the
packing list is right, it matches what's on the outside the box but the lens is
missing which is no big deal because I have other c-mount lenses. But
unfortunately the cameras is the wrong model. So this is the color 8 gigabyte version
instead of the monochrome 16 gigabyte version. But maybe it will work out well in the
end because I'm sure they'll make this right and there's a place for a 32 gig
option so maybe I'll be able to get a 32 gigabyte version.
It seems really well built. It fits in the hand nicely. It's knurled here so
it grips nicely. I don't know about this fan and these vent holes here. Might have to
make an enclosure for this. SD card, nice large display, a couple of places for
mounting attachments, like on a tripod, a battery port, a lot of connections on the
side power: Gigabit Ethernet, trigger, headset, microphone, HDMI, eSATA, on the go
mini USB A, and then some general purpose I/O. If anyone out there is looking for
their 8 gigabyte color version and currently has a monochrome 16 gigabyte
version, let me know. Maybe we can avoid hassle with Customs. Otherwise I'm going
to charge up the battery and begin to learn a little bit about how this camera works.
I want to show the camera,s interface. If you go to Record Settings, you can see
the different resolutions that are available and to get higher frame rates you
have to reduce the resolution. The default resolution is 1080 by 1024
and that allows for nearly 1,100 frames per second. The fastest speed is
640 by 96 at nearly 22,000 frames per second. When a faster frame rate is
selected a smaller region is read off of the sensor. Some of them have a very
narrow read out, 1280 by 96 at 11,000 frames per second is a good example.
Only this little bar is read off the sensor. You may be able to orient the
camera in a way that really optimizes the use of the sensor. More information
on the development of the Chronos high-speed camera is available from the
creator David Kronstein's YouTube channel Tesla 500 After using the
Chronos for a few hours I've a few observations. If your lens doesn't have
sufficient range of focus, you may need to add extension tubes or turn the lens
out a little bit. Be sure to eject the card before removing it from the camera.
That's mentioned in documentation but if you don't head it, your files are likely
to be corrupted. Larger SD cards are hard to format on Windows 10. They need to be
formatted SAT34for the Chronos to read them and windows 10 does not support FAT32,
well on larger SD cards you can download a
program called GUI Format from Ridge Corp consulting. It's free and it does a
quick format on larger SD cards. A 64 gigebyte SD card formats in about a couple of
seconds. The Chronos seems to be an ARM based system. The Linux distribution
that's associated with it appears to be Angstrom from September 2011. And finally,
I'd like to hear from you what your applications for a high-speed camera
would be and would you choose a color or grayscale camera. Thank you for watching.
we'll talk again soon.