This $5,000 High-Speed Camera Makes the Exploding World Accessible

​There's no real set m​aximum to the frame rate capability of the human eye. It just depends on too many factors, like individual physiology (or training), the nature of the frames themselves (blurred or otherwise), and even what the subject is actually trying to perceive (individual frames versus a "movie"). But it's possible to set some reasonable and provisional (for example, the subject is not a fighter pilot) upper boundaries, which would seem to be somewhere between 100 and 155 frames per second. (The subject would really have to be trying.) The point is that we miss a lot of the world, or at least the world that occurs at time scales of milliseconds.

That's a lot of what exists around us. And this is the allure of super-high speed photography, in which the world might be captured at frame rates in the tens of thousands per second. High-speed cameras are, however, usually very expensive, going for anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000. This is where the (relative) startup Sanstreak Corp. comes with its Edgertronic camera (named for high-speed photography pioneer Harold Edgerton), a $5,000 tool offering framerates of up to 18,000 fps at lower resolutions and 500 fps and the highest resolutions, according to a startup profile at IEEE Spectrum. Since a 2013 Kickstarter campaign, the corp. has sold about 400 cameras, which is a lot of exploding water balloons.

That's all well and good, but you came here for some way-cool high-res snapshots of stuff, so enjoy. This whole world could be yours for the price of a used car.