Line scan camera image processing for train photography

Super cool. I wonder if you could re-use a regular 2-d CMOS digital camera sensor to the same effect. But now I realize your sensor is basically 1-D and has a 95khz sampling rate. At the same rate with a 4k sensor you'd have way too much data to store and would need to throw most of it away.

Pretty sure could do it but it would be very expensive, because you'd need alot more very fast ADCs.

Like if the camera is $5k, in order to get that exposure time in full-field you would need to duplciate the hardware 800 times or whatever you wanted horizontal resolution to be. Thats alot of zeros for a single camera

Pretty sure it is doable with consumer cameras, although of course matching the physical movement would be a lot harder. For instance, a Sony a7R IV has a 1/20s readout. And you see that with electronic shutter, because the camera scans from top to bottom. Which for video is bad. But that does mean that you can record 10fps full-frame compressed raw photos, over a horizontal resolution of 6336 pixels. So that would be an “acquisition rate” of 63khz.

The problem of course being that you need to shift the camera by one sensor width every tenth of a second, accurate to the pixel, if you want to make use of that full horizontal temporal resolution. And I’m not sure how you match together the 1/20s readout with all of that. So pessimistically, maybe only ~30khz.

Actually, did the math and if you can accept video compression, the video modes might be sufficient. 4K@30fps looks like ~64khz. And if you had a more capable video camera, that could be 4-8 times better.

Perhaps I misunderstood the original question, I thought the idea was to go full field at 95 kHz, which would be either very expensive or very crummy resolution (like 50x50 crummy), or some combination of the two. Not getting a full-field camera to work line a line scan camera, which should be possible but would require some rewiring or special software, you're probably better off just getting a regular line scan camera.

There is actually a way to get full field at very high frame rates and NOT ridiculous expensive, but its not sustained. I believe it involves some type of "sample and hold" with something like capacitor banks, so the digital read out can be done slowly.