Hi I've got an exciting one for you today. Check out this. It's the Kronos High-speed Digital camera. This is a Kickstarter done by David Kron Steen aka Tesla 500.

If you're not subscribed to his YouTube channel, you definitely should. Fellow video blogger and he's running a Kickstarter it should be out live by the time you watch this video hopefully. And it's a twenty five hundred US dollar high-speed digital camera and he's developed this all on his own over the last ten years. He's been experimenting with high-speed digital cameras and there's many videos on his website actually designed in various art prototypes of this thing.

So this is the real deal. Unlike a lot of Kickstarter and other bloody IndieGoGo crap and stuff like that, this is a real prototype. Dave Sent me. This is Lucky Seven that's upside down.

All the electrons are going to fall out. so let's take a quick look at this thing and see what we've got. This is a prototype out unit. It's got prototype so beta software, everything else.

so please bear that in mind. And just a disclaimer: I believe Dave is letting me keep this for use on the blog for doing some high-speed photography will come in very handy so just bear that in mind. But as usual I don't let that affect my review is whatsoever. Now 2,500 US bucks might sound a lot for a Kickstarter camera, but this is a game-changing high-speed camera.

nothing else on the market touches. The resolution is in this thing. It can do what? 1280 by 1024 at a thousand and fifty seven frames frames per second. That's the slowest speed right up to 520 1649.

that frames per second for 640 by 96. And it's got say like a usable say 640 by 360 at 5900 frames per second. So Wow and in the hand, it feels really solid. It's a machined aluminium as you can see here, a beautiful design.

It's got a massive 5-inch screen at the back. and if you compare the size of this thing to my Sony Rx100 uh my for that's my other high-speed camera, this thing is a beast. Look good! Wow And we've got a standard SD card slot here. you can save H.264 video - we've got it so as a shutter button, power button, recording and recharge light, and a microphone on the top and also the speaker down here.

The firmware that I've got at the moment does not have the microphone or the audio enabled, but it certainly will. It's got a beautiful jog shuttle for playback. we'll see in a second and on the side here. Dave's thought of absolutely everything to make this a really great industrial high speed camera.

We've got microphone, external microphone, line in, you've got to have external mic. Fantastic headphone. We've got a real B and C here for the external trigger input and also the frame. its strobe sync output as well.

Fantastic! Gigabit Ethernet External Power: You can actually run the camera from the external out 40 watt power input. fantastic for you know, a dedicated lab setups and measurements and stuff like that you don't want to be around with. you know, try to take out an external battery and all that sort of crap. Um, external full resolution HDMI to hook up to an external monitor if as if the in building 5 inch wasn't good enough here.

External USB and not eSATA and USB mini-b as well as standard Phoenix Contact once ver are once again external trigger and isolated external trigger as well. That could be handy for our grounded system installations and stuff like that. And just because two one makes sample per second a DC inputs terrific why not and a micro SD card slot for the firmware because you can do a firmware updates in this thing of course and the tripod mount is directly in line with the sensor. Fantastic.

And the battery is up. what are they standard icon ones? Apparently you can get at one point seven hours a regular operation or as I said, external plug pack operation as well. and we've got a back focus our adjustment as well depending on the type of that you're actually installing. Neat.

It's thought of everything. So I really like the battery contacts directly on the PCB down in there. Really neat solution. And we've got a temperature control fan on the front and yes, that does allow our continuous operation.

Lots of vents in here I'm not sure in terms of like you know dust and stuff are getting in in long-term use we'll have to what. See about that And since the porn no sorry I don't know what one is in there? maybe Dave cannot tell us that and it's a standard that C-mount lens interface as well. And of course the Cieaura CS mount lens is industry standard for a you know, security cameras, microscopes. you know, other high-speed industrial cameras and things like that.

So he's really chosen the correct interface there and he supplied this lens. It won't actually come with the lens, you'll have to buy your own. So he's just giving me a secondhand. Fuji camera.

You know security type camera art lens on this thing but this should allow us to get this puppy up and running. and this is called the Chronos with a C and given that Dave's name is Crone with a K and it is company is Chronos Technology I reckon it should be named the Chronos with a k and the fan-in is our temperature control but just during normal operation it is relatively annoying. It's not super loud but enough to be annoying. So for a one-man-band to do actually are develop a kickstart a high-speed camera like this and you know I recently professionally feelin one I mean and I Eat doesn't have the million dollars to put into our tooling that? Yeah, you know your Canons and your Ngons and her companies Sony's and companies like that have but you know it's It's really surprisingly well built and well designed for like you know, a one-man band do-it-yourself Kickstarter It's fantastic, more than adequate for the job of like you know, an industrial type high speed camera.

and considering this is made in the tens and will be made in the hundreds or maybe the you know, thousands if it goes really well. And oh, you can't put a million bucks into our tool in and everything like that. But I like the machined alloy case, it feels really good. It's just an issue with a grip.

You know he's done his best with the grip, but yeah, it's You know it's not as good as a professional our consumer type camera in that regard, and nor do you expect it to be really. And it's got four machine holes on the front here. I'm not sure what they're for, probably for right, you know, third party type are adapters or any sort of, you know, custom lens or some other adapter. Nice touch.

Now it does take a while to boot up and we'll show you that Working here, here we go. we'll switch it on I Think it takes about 30 seconds or something like that. I'll do it in real time now. One of the problems I have with this.

It does have like a grip, but you can't just hold it like that. Um, you know you really have to get your thumb over this knob so that's one of the problems I've had is that you know like to hold it like that without it falling slipping out of your hand. Got to put your hand and your thumb is a lot of pressure on that knob so but it's it. feels really sturdy that knob but hey, that's an issue.

and also the capacitive touchscreen is so close to there. I Found myself accidentally touching these buttons and starting recording and and doing the black calibration and stuff like that Now I'm not sure if you'll be able to see this clearly when I first turned it on I'm getting all these speckles and stuff all over the image until I figured out what that actually was. that's actually the focus peaking. Fantastic! I Love focus peaking and zebra stripes as well.

My two favorite features in a camera and it's got that! Absolutely brilliant. So that was just showing where we're in focus on this particular one. So here we go. I Can bring the focus There we go.

Focus in and out and you should see that change. You can probably see those cables over there. There we go. those cables on the bench changing.

Nice touch. Now as far as the user interface goes here: I Really like it. It's easy to get up and running. you've got your record settings here and then you can choose your two for all your different settings down here.

Frame rate, you know I'm going to. You know I might do a lot of my testing that. 1280 by 720, 720p, 1500 frames per second at Oh Brilliant! For two and a half grand, this is fantastic. We can do our gain of course you saw that image before we can up our gain and you will actually see the resolution change.

Now we've got the black bars top and bottom and we can adjust our shutter by just dragging that bar down there like that. Perfect for setting up. Of course you want to set up your experiment and then you adjust your uh shutter so that you're just not over exposing. Terrific! And we've got to focus aid so we can simply go in there.

It expands the center and we can play around with our focus. Beautiful! and the set white balance is a single touch. You put a white balance card in front and your regular camera stuff and your black calibration to you want to completely block out lens to do that. The problem with these? these are single touch and I've accidentally hit the black cow before and it takes like 20 seconds to do that.

It'll be faster in the in the final firmware version. but yeah, just annoying to have those as a single touch I'd like a confirmation on those, especially when you're holding it and your thumb can easily accidentally touch those buttons. Of course, a high-speed camera is absolutely useless without extensive external triggering. So here's our arm: IO One to three different external got the isolated input down here so we can trigger the voltage threshold.

It's got 20 milliamp pull up, two milliamp pull up. Debouncing Fantastic. Exactly what you want and somewhat confusingly and I didn't get this the first time. How to do our pre and post triggering? Well, it's in the trigger menu here and you set the number of frames so you can't set percentage.

I've talked to Dave about this and he said yeah, you know he'll probably add that in the firmware. So if you want to capture of course you want to capture things after your trigger event both before and after, you have to manually set the number of frames in here you want to capture and the number of frames will D be dependent upon the maximum resolution and we can have our B and C output the frame sync as well. Terrific for our laboratory measurements and stuff like that, everything's thought of here. Now one of the main gripes: I had that when I first used this and it was a little confusing.

End day is going to fix this in the final firmware I think and it doesn't actually tell you how many frames it can actually capture when you actually press record. Here we go. so we're actually recording now I'm just sticking my hand in front of that and it's continuously recorded in a loop in a Ddr3 buffer a memory buffer I believe it is and it won't actually save things to the SD card of course because they're too slow until you are a trigger and then it stops and when you actually stop it and then go back into play here, it'll actually tell you how many frames you've actually got there. So for my current resolution which is 1280 by 720 I've got six thousand, two hundred and five frames so it'll always capture those six thousand, two hundred and five frames and in the current firmware by default which I found confusing but I believe it'll be fixed in the final version is that when you use the shutter button on top, there is no post trigger delay in this thing.

So with the shutter button on top is actually the stock button. but if you actually externally trigger it in the current firmware, then you can actually do post capture post trigger data using the trigger delay with the number of frames that you set here. Now I have actually found a bug in the current firmer and that's to do with the battery gauge. I've had it just died on me and Dave's confirmed.

Yeah, there's our battery gauge issues. he's looking for another battery and stuff like that, but that's only on my prototype unit and I'm sure the final version will have like a you know I prop, a flash screen, boot screen and all that sort of jazz. so don't worry about that. So one of the annoying things at the moment and I complain to Dave and he said he might fix this is that the shutter button does not start the recording, it only stops it or the external wire trigger will stop it.

So let's try the external trigger and we if we press record like this and external trigger BAM Like that there we go, it just stopped. and then we can go back in and play that back so that external trigger can work with anything. but because I've got like a 20 milliamp I pull up at the moment and I've inverted it, just shorting it out. so basically grounding the input will actually just stop the recording and then of course any post captured data that you specified in here.

it won't stop instantly. If you have a value in there, it'll stop X number of frames later and I'm not sure if you can see that, but I'm recording outside now here in quite bright light, not direct. Suns A little bit overcast and it's really difficult to see that screen. It's okay directly on, but if you try and get at an angle like that.

yeah, not terrific, so not the best. LCD Outside I'm afraid and thermally. I've actually had this recording for 30 minutes continuously. You can see that maybe see the light is still recording, light's still on the top.

So as I said, I'll have a continuous buffer I'm coming out of the vent. there are only talking 35 35 degrees or there abouts. granted it is. I Have got the aircon on here in the lab, but yet thermally, this thing is just fine.

No heating overheating issues whatsoever. I was just shooting outside before in 35 degree heat. Not a problem Now of course the problem with high speed photography is that you need a metric buttload of light and no wonder Dave is actually on his. A.

YouTube channel has actually designed the world's brightest LED light for our all these high-speed our photography stuff. So I'll link that one down below. Now if I turn the gain all the way up and that's my aperture that I'm closing now I can close it right off right off of course but it starts to get really noisy if I want to get everything in focus here. So yeah, it's just high speed photography is really tricky.

You must have a ton of light. Generally that means outdoors. if your indoor you need hundreds of what thousands of watts to of light directly on your subject. One of the things aren't missing from this by the way is the gain.

Said you'd like to see a few more hour settings on the screen than just the resolution, frame rate, and battery level and exposure there. But anyway, if I turn my lights on here I Couldn't get it in focus before. but now because I've got the studio light on and zero DB gain can turn the aperture down like that and of course I can adjust my shutter like that and I can now see that pretty much the ring. I'm not sure if you can see it, but the ring is in focus and that's exactly what I want.

So beautiful Now it's ready to shoot. Okay so I'm going to try and get a high-speed shot of a water drop here. I've got some red food coloring and I'm going to press record and go for it. So now it's armed, ready to go and as soon as I drop this in, then I'm and I'm happy with the shot.

I'm only going to be recording about four seconds at this resolution. that's the maximum. Then I press the stop shutter button on the top and we can replay it. So here we go.

Now it hasn't saved that to the SD card at all. So we have to go into the playback here and the playback is very nice. So the currently it's 60 frames per second and we can just drag this slider Well there we go when see the drop didn't? Ah yeah, you can see the ripples coming out there. we go and you can adjust the playback like that and you can do it like this as well just by holding that down.

Look at that or so you go just before it impacts and you can use the jog shuttle as well. Look at that. Beautiful. haha.

Fantastic! Now you'll notice that we actually recorded four thousand, three hundred and sixty-five frames there. And if you save that, if you just hit, save, saves it to the SD card. Fine, but it can take several minutes to actually do that. It saves it quite slowly anyway.

I'll just show you the settings here we go. We can now set up our encoder, H.264 profile, and all that goodness where we're going to save it to and I believe you can remote save it to our remote drives when you've got the Ethernet and all that hooked up. I Haven't actually tried that? I'm not going to try that today, but if we save the whole thing, we don't want to do that. So what we want to do is actually set it just before the drop comes in and we can go mark in.

There we go and it saves the mark and then we can just keep going. We can play it until we're happy with the end of it. Born Born Ripple Ripple Ripple ripple ripple like that and then we can set mark out and then save. and it'll only save the part that you mark that can save an awful amount of our time.

When you are saver back, you're not saving any redundant data. Oops. I Press save. I've had this before.

Saved Director is not writable and I found that last time if I just took the SD card out and worked it back in that fixed it so we might have a bug there. Yep and you'll notice that it's slowly climbing up, climbing up and saving all of those frames so that'll take a minute or two. So you've just got to remember that with this camera. If you're recording something here and then you press stop and then you forget to actually play it back and save it, then not going to be saying you press record again.

It allows you start recording anyway and discard the unsaved data in RAM yes or no. So yeah, at least it warns you. Just be careful and let's see if I can now recall my below vow: Accutron watch with a little of vibrating tuning fork coil in there. let's give it a go using a a are just a macro lens tape to the front because the thread is a ruined on this thing.

but yeah it's you need a lot of light and I tried the HDMI but I can't die apart from my some sort of AA screen and a bit fuzzy looking that Linux boot up stuff I couldn't actually get that to work. so yeah once again this is prototype. It's like be the software, everything else I'm not sure if it's actually supposed to be working in this particular prototype or not, but I'm sure the final product will. no worries.

So there you have it, that's the Chronos prototype. Kickstarter 1.4 C is this model and hats off today! This is absolutely brilliant to have the balls to do a Kickstarter for a high-speed camera and incredibly complex device that's the market is dominated by, you know, the major players. See a similar camera with this sort of specs like I believe is like ten times five to ten times the cost or something like that. So it's absolutely incredible that he's going to be able to sell this thing for 2,500 bucks.

The capability is absolutely amazing and Dave is the real deal. Of course, this prototype is the real deal. There'll be lots of other prototypes, are going out to other blogs and and review our sites and stuff like that. So unlike most Kickstarter's this one has actual real hardware and real functioning hardware.

I mean I could use this right now as it stands as the prototype for doing all my high-speed photography for the blog. It's absolutely brilliant and of course I did want to show you the obligatory shots of the exploding capacitors, but outside now a storm has come through. it's dark, it's raining so yeah, I have to do that outside. So I'll say that for a future video.

Until then night, you'll have to make do with some birds I shot this morning outside. Very crude setup I was just really doing it quick, but I got some amazing footage and the amount of engineering that's gone into this is absolutely ridiculous. Probably an order of magnitude more than the next most complex Kickstarter I've seen I mean just the hardware in this thing alone. designing that with all the high-speed capture stuff and days.

Been working on this for like a decade. Various prototypes leading up this amount of work in that, let alone the software interface which actually works really really well. He's put a lot of thought into it. Yeah, there are a few quirks and stuff like that, but I'm sure they'll be.

You know, fixed up a lot of features that I thought were that should have been obvious and they weren't Davis said yeah, he's going to work on those and add them. And one thing I'm really interested is the running gun mode which is not in this prototype where you can just hit the shutter button to start it'll automatically are record and then save the SD card and then boom you're ready to go again. the hence the you know the term running gun. You can just go shoot.

You don't have to dick around with playing it back and saving it manually and all that sort of stuff, but that will be in an additional update for the firmware. So very impressive. Some features: I Haven't tried all the remote capability and stuff like that I haven't actually tried that yet, but this is an absolute winner folks! If you want to get into high-speed photography, back this project! I Have No doubts. Dave will deliver on this puppy because he's already delivered like a dozen full-on working prototypes like this.

He could go straight into production pretty much with what we see here. So very impressive. Yes, I will be doing a teardown on this and Dave has agreed to help out with that, so we're not sure the logistics of how that's going to happen, but that will be exciting. So the teardown with the designer hopefully coming soon? That's brilliant.

Thumbs up! Catch you next time you, you you you you.