ISG developing new camera family for DV apps.
 

Hi

My firm is currently designing a new LightWise family of cameras.

I am interested in finding out if there is interest in these cameras in the DV market. I ask the favor of requesting honest insights into this market so that ISG can design and market cameras that users will want and can afford.

Our goal is to use this forum as a marketing tool to find out what users want and need and try to determine the selling price that will create a decent market to pursue.

We would like to service this market with affordable cameras that fit the needs of this market. We need the help from the type of people who are involved in this forum.

Our existing products are shown on our website and were originally designed for the machine vision marketplace but found their way into a few DV and telecine applications. They were not designed to target the DV market but we are hoping our future product family will be more useful to more users in the DV markets.

Your assistance is appreciated.

As a start ISG has 3 potential products to have you review and provide feedback to me. Please let me know if you would be interested in any of these.

1)
LW-5-S-1394b-C = 5 Megapixel camera = with a ROI setting for 1920 x 1080 pixels = 30 fps resolution with 1394b (800) with Embedded JPEG inside camera. Potentially available in January 2008. Small Quantity costs would be ~$2K or less. For fully processed images (24-bit RGB) you would need a compression ratio of 3 to 1 (which is LOSSLESS) to send live data over the 1394b interface. This will be an ISG standard product. Uses the Micron MT9P001 5Mp CMOS sensor with synchronous rolling shutter. Sponsorship could enable quicker availability.

2)
LW-KAI-2093-1394b-C = 2.1 Megapixel camera = 1920 x 1080 pixels = 30 fps full resolution with 1394b (800) with Embedded JPEG inside camera. Potentially available in January 2008. Small Quantity costs would be ~$4K Uses Eastman Kodak KAI CCD with global shutter. We are looking for a sponsor to complete this design. This sponsor would invest $18K to complete the work. For fully processed images (24-bit RGB) you would need a compression ratio of 3 to 1 (which is LOSSLESS) to send live data over the 1394b interface. This would be an identical camera as #1 above but with the Kodak CCD. Sponsor covers cost of the CCD sensor board and engineering.

3)
LW-KAI-2093-Ethernet-2NTSC = 2.1 Megapixel camera = 1920 x 1080 pixels = 30 fps full resolution with 10/100 Ethernet and (2) NTSC ports with Embedded JPEG inside camera. Potentially available in December. Small Quantity costs would be ~$4K Uses Eastman Kodak KAI CCD with global shutter.. We are looking for a sponsor to complete the this design. This sponsor would invest $15K to complete the CCD sensor board and engineering work. You would need a compression ratio of 60 to 1 to send live data over the 10/100 ethernet interface.

In mid-2008 ISG could offer these same options above with Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

Best regards,
Kerry

******************************************
Kerry Van Iseghem
Imaging Solutions Group
1387 Fairport Road, Ste 890,
Fairport, NY 14450 USA
Phone => 585-388-5220
Cell => 585-230-9090
Fax => 585-388-5223
E-mail => kerry@ISGchips.com
Website => www.ISGchips.com

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could be nice
the third: LW-KAI-2093-Ethernet-2NTSC
did you mean that it can send to the pc through ethernet the hd video
and we have 2 ntsc output that can we connect to an external monitor for a preview!?is that right!?

What does it all mean?

As alternative techique user and tester, I alway think there is a better way.

So what I would be looking for is something with (1) a large sensor, about the size of 35mm frame, thus imparting the depth of field associated with 35mm film production (2) That will work using 35mm lenses. (3) That will provide a frame rate of 24fps, non interlaced. (4) High speed without the grain associated with application of electronic gain. (5) Sure would be nice to capture all of this on an internal swapable standard hardrive (6) Since we are asking, rolling CMOS shutters cause their own issues, but my understanding is that full field capture is still not possible, but you guys can do it !

Kerry,
Nice to see the interest in DV users. I remember talking to you over email over a year ago about this stuff.

Camera 2 (LW-KAI-2093-1394b-C) sounds best. I think a gigabit ethernet interface would be better though, as it is more ubiquitous than 1394b. A lot of people on this forum are pushing for cineform RAW fpga compression, or raw data over gigabit ethernet for compression pc-side.

On the low end side there already some working cameras like the Elphel, but as far as affordable/practical cameras with 2/3" and larger sensors like the KAI-2093 and KAI-4021 go, there isn't much.

Very interesting.

What would you provide in the way of software support? i.e., Windows WDM drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit (ideally Win2K, XP and Vista - or even Windows 7 by then!). Would the drivers meet existing MS standards/protocols to ensure that such cameras are natively visible to existing NLEs (particulary those based on DirectShow)? Would the products use proprietary file formats for off-camera storage or would existing formats be used (AVI, QuickTime etc)?

Likewise for OSX....

For option 3, you ought to seriously consider PAL, too (about twice as many countries use PAL than NTSC, including the most populous).

Hello all!

..the spec of these cameras look very similar to what Elphel makes.

The elphel 5mpixel rolling shutter camera is OPEN SOURCE - so you can freely modify user interface etc...and is around 800USD.

Specs: http://www3.elphel.com/en/products

User community: http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=63677&page=54

and company site: http://www3.elphel.com/

The developer is very open to feedback from this community - see above threads - and they are developing a camera that can have its own internal harddrive for standalone operation. (no laptop etc)

cheers :)

//O.

portability and sensor size are really important. being tied to a laptop for power and control is a real problem... for these cameras do be at all useful for DV applications it would need to have at least the feature set in this pic -

http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/19156/1189675498.jpg