Near Future: New Camera / New Sensor

With the next generation camera from Elphel called "Elphel 373" (Blog post by Andrey Filippov) soon being hardware complete we were starting to think what this new camera will mean for us filmmakers. The featurelist is long but for us one of the most important changes is definitely USB 2.0 support which will allow us to connect any external HDD or cardreader with an USB cable and record video onto it.

In another blog post Andrey talks about the addition of a second FPGA video output stream at lower resolution which will ultimately solve all the problems we ran into when thinking about how to build our viewfinder options. With this lower resolution stream of the cameras live video we will be able to use a much wider range of lower performance products like a beagleboard with HDMI ouput as viewfinder. This will also allow us to make Apertus PC-free, if you don't consider a beagleboard or similar a PC as well.

After release of the new camera the focus will shift to a new sensor frontend which is the heart of any cinematic camera. This new sensor choice will hopefully be a fundamental improvement and could potentially warp Apertus into the high end of cinematic camera products. To get a better overview of what sensor types and sizes you are currently using we started a poll which you surely have already notice on the right handside of the website. The list of some sensors currently being considered can be found here. On the forum discussion about the future sensors has also been started here.