A QUICK-RETRIEVAL HIGH-SPEED DIGITAL FRAMING CAMERA

A new high-speed digital framing camera is described. The design is bu ilt around a rotating polygon mirror that provides a framing rate of 2 4 000 frames/s. The camera electronics digitizes an image into a 32 X 104 grid of pixels, where the second dimension of the grid can be vari ed and is determined by the 8 bit computer-aided measurement and contr ol digitizer sampling rate. Available digitizer memory provides for 31 4 frames at this horizontal resolution. The advantages over other avai lable high-speed framing cameras are (1) low cost of the system provid ed the digitizers are available, (2) rapid retrieval of a recorded eve nt, and (3) the ease with which the system can be used. Sample results from an application in high-power arc photography are given to illust rate the system's spatial and temporal resolution.