The Editor's saturday soap box column is back, this time: Casio's remarkable 60 pictures a second still camera development

Casio's prototype high speed camera

Yesterday, Casio announced it is developing a camera that would be capable of taking a staggering sixty still images a second, at six megapixels resolution. Why on earth would you need a camera like that?, I hear the chorus cry?

Re-convergence of stills and video

For years I have believed that the ultimate destiny of at least one branch of digital stills photography is as one half of the convergence between video movie and stills cameras. Movie cameras grew out of stills cameras in the 19th century and the two have remained closely linked every since; 35mm film cameras use a film stock originally designed for movie cameras, for example. So why should it be so surprising that movie and stills camera features can't be combined into a single camera that develops high quality results in both modes? I ask this, because whenever I've raised this subject in the past, it attracts numerous detractors who feel it's either not needed or unacheivable.

Of course, in some semses we're already there. Most compact digital stills cameras have a movie mode and vice-versa. But the cameras themselves are designed primarily to work as a stills camera or a movie camera. My prediction is that we will eventually see cameras that are equally good at shooting stills or video and that high quality stills will be user-selected from the movie footage.

Snap at the wrong time and that transient expression is lost for ever

The big problem with conventional stills cameras today is that you usually only get one chance to capture a fleeting moment. Snap at the wrong time and that transient expression is lost for ever. Even with cameras that can shoot continuously at 3 frames per second, which many consumer cameras can nowadays, that momentary magic can continue to be elusive. Professional sports and news photographers know this all too well, which is why their professional DSLR cameras are getting faster and faster, now up to 12 frames per second with the recently annouced Nikon D3, for example. But even then, 12fps is less than half the frame rate of movie recording and stills cameras only record when you press the shutter button, and even then only for a few seconds at a time.

High quality stills from video

Imagine a camera that can record minutes of video movie footage and then enable you to search through that footage and select a frame for printing that is comparable in quality to what we see in today's dedicated digital stills cameras. It looks like Casio is striving to deliver just such a facility with the work it is doing with the development of its new and unnamed prototype. With a shooting rate of 60fps, at six megapixels per frame, twice the frame rate of conventional digital video motion picture footage, losing the moment should become a welcome rarity.

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