A 500 dollar camera setup can now take 685 billion pictures per second which used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ultrafast imaging usually requires massive, specialized streak cameras that are far too expensive for most labs. This new system uses off the shelf components and a passive imaging technique to reach speeds of 685 billion frames per second. It allows researchers to see events happening on the scale of a single picosecond. This level of visualization makes it possible to watch light move or capture the first moments of a chemical reaction. Bringing this tech to a consumer price point democratizes high-end physics research for the first time.
Low-cost passive single-shot ultrafast imaging at 685 Gfps
arXiv · 2604.27898
Capturing ultrafast transient phenomena conventionally requires streak cameras or computational imaging based on compressed sensing, which lead to complex and costly systems. In this Letter, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully passive single-shot ultrafast imaging architecture assembled entirely from off-the-shelf, low-cost components. A commercial microlens array combined with a stack of standard microscope cover glasses maps temporal information into multiple spatial