What limits FPS?

[thetrue]

The same reason Chevy retards the timing and air/fuel mix for the Camaro even though its the same engine as the Corvette. Most people just won't change anything.

 

[Light Guru]

I wonder (sue me!) if there's some hardware that can be added to increase the performance, almost like adding RAM to your PC. Any thoughts on this?

Again NO.

 

[thetrue]

Light Guru - please don't take this thread to heart. I'm just asking because I like to tinker. I modify anything and everything to make it suit my needs. Just some good-hearted curiosity going on here

 

[Light Guru]

Light Guru - please don't take this thread to heart. I'm just asking because I like to tinker. I modify anything and everything to make it suit my needs. Just some good-hearted curiosity going on here

Your questions come of like you just have no clue how a modern camera works. They are more computer then camera in many ways. Sure software can be hacked but hardware limitations are not so simple. And you seem to not understand what hardware limitations are.

 

[timor]

to do something like the Sony cameras do?

Are Sony cameras flipping the mirror at all ? Or are they using semitransparent mirror ("translucent mirror technology" ... Wrong description anyway, but Sony is selling it without a shame.). Half of the light goes to the VF which is not even optical anymore, no pentaprism but another TV, the other half goes to the sensor to create an image. But that's nothing new, it was already done in film era. The big champion of pellicle mirrors was Canon with top EOS 1n RS doing 10 fps (with film).

 

[bratkinson]

Unless you are a well-experienced micro-electronics engineer, work for the camera manufacturer in question, AND have access to a motherboard manufacturing factory, it's unlikely anything other than some minor software tweaks for image processing can be done to the camera.

As mentioned before, the camera is mostly a computer with an optical sensor attached, and a mechanical shutter on DSLRs. With any computer, "throughput" (how fast it can process stuff) is constrained by the limits of electrical transmission speed (not an issue in a camera), transmission/reaction times of each chip and it's component micro-transistors, storage bus speed (connections to and from the memory card (it has to 'confirm' what it just recorded! or, at least, acknowledge it just received 14 bits of data)), and lastly, the 'reaction speed' of the individual senels in the sensor plate.

While we humans think an exposure at 1/5000 of a second is super fast, in terms of what speed a computer processes, we're talking 1 or 2 nano-seconds per instruction! (billionths of seconds). So 1/5000 sec is an ETERNITY for a computer. To make the computers faster, desktop and laptop processors have embedded data storage right inside the processor chip itself to eliminate the 'waiting' necessary to get the next instruction and data from 'storage' (a RAM chip or more somewhere on the motherboard). Even the microcoding embedded in the physics of the chip is a 'science' of its own to optimize data access times across multiple processors communicating across multiple buses to multiple storage locations...all inside a single chip smaller and thinner than the fingernail on your pinkie! Simply put, the internal workings of a computer processor are far beyond most people, even beyond many electrical engineers, as well. It's also exceedingly proprietary and "top secret" at the chip manufacturers such as Intel or Motorola. And who knows who made what chips in camera A...or camera B... or which revision of those chips were used since such and such date, etc...

So, unless you are a high level technical engineer at Canon, Nikon, Sony, or wherever, the likelihood of being able to make a software 'hack' of any kind is somewhere between positive zero and negative zero (yes, all computers can represent negative zero!)

And I'm just a retired computer geek...what do I know?

 

[Tony S]

Yes, Buy one of these....

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lt9tvgKbeB1qzkn7so1_500.jpg

Or another option and use it to nab stills from the video (stills extraction).... it's only a cool $11,999



http://static.bhphoto.com/images/images500x500/855962.jpg

 

[Benco]

to do something like the Sony cameras do?

Are Sony cameras flipping the mirror at all ? Or are they using semitransparent mirror ("translucent mirror technology" ... Wrong description anyway, but Sony is selling it without a shame.). Half of the light goes to the VF which is not even optical anymore, no pentaprism but another TV, the other half goes to the sensor to create an image. But that's nothing new, it was already done in film era. The big champion of pellicle mirrors was Canon with top EOS 1n RS doing 10 fps (with film).

Not quite, the translucent mirror reflects a proportion of the light up into the focus array (something mirrorless cameras can't do) and the EVF is a live view from the sensor, it's supposed to allow DSLR quality focusing and metering without needing to move the mirror out of the way to take a picture. According to what I've read about the SLT cameras it does give you a lot of bang for your bucks as far as FPS goes.

 

[Light Guru]

So, unless you are a high level technical engineer at Canon, Nikon, Sony, or wherever, the likelihood of being able to make a software 'hack' of any kind is somewhere between positive zero and negative zero (yes, all computers can represent negative zero!)

Well said!