Why is the Phantom camera so expensive?
August 15, 2011 1:35 PM Subscribe
Why are the Phantom slow-mo cameras so expensive?
What makes a slow-mo camera so expensive? Specifically I've been researching the Phantom cameras which run into the 6 figures (USD). Daily rentals run a couple grand. They certainly can shoot some impressive footage, but what about them makes them so exorbitantly pricey?
What makes a slow-mo camera so expensive? Specifically I've been researching the Phantom cameras which run into the 6 figures (USD). Daily rentals run a couple grand. They certainly can shoot some impressive footage, but what about them makes them so exorbitantly pricey?
Three reasons:
1. Economies of scale. The demand for such cameras is relatively low, so the cost per unit must be quite high to compensate.
2. Desirability/Exclusivity. The footage is impressive, and impossible to obtain by other means, so a high profit margin can be earned on the back of those who simply must have that kind of footage.
3. Complexity. More frames per second means a much better lens to gather sufficient light to enable rapid frame rates, and faster storage mechanisms to capture the frames without any dropped frames. That costs money.
posted by davejay at 1:42 PM on August 15, 2011
1. Economies of scale. The demand for such cameras is relatively low, so the cost per unit must be quite high to compensate.
2. Desirability/Exclusivity. The footage is impressive, and impossible to obtain by other means, so a high profit margin can be earned on the back of those who simply must have that kind of footage.
3. Complexity. More frames per second means a much better lens to gather sufficient light to enable rapid frame rates, and faster storage mechanisms to capture the frames without any dropped frames. That costs money.
posted by davejay at 1:42 PM on August 15, 2011
The first camera on your link goes from 1560 fps to 13,000fps, which means the maximum exposure time per frame is between 1/1560 to 1/13000, which requires, I would imagine, much more light sensistivity than is available on regular video cameras - on the order of 216 times as much light, or around 8 stops, which is reaaally a lot.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
More frames per second = less time to take each picutre. Less time to take each picture = fast lens or more sensitive film/CCDCMOS sensor (or, most likely, a bit of both). Both of these are expensive. Combine that with a limited audience and you are dealing with something very expensive.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2011 [2 favorites]
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2011 [2 favorites]
Phantom is a high end camera. Nearly all high end cameras are designed for the abuse they get on the TV/film set. They have lots of connectors, lots of electronics. Lenses often run in the tens of thousands of dollars. Cinematographers want these cameras because they fit the job and tools required. The slow-motion isn't the reason for the high price, it's the whole package that is pricey. Eventually your cell phone will likely get a low-light sensor (camera) and you'll be able to do something similar. But for today, cameras like the one you mention are at the forefront of digital photography and you'll pay a premium to access this.
posted by bprater at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by bprater at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
I've worked with their parent company before. It's not like RED where they're making so many low priced cameras that the rental market collapsed.
Their units are also used for industrial needs in manufacturing. They have to have their sensors & lenses manufactured in very small runs - these are able to dump data to very high speed ram. Think if you wanted to buy the fastest CCD, with the greatest amount of light sensitivity and nobody made it...so you make it yourself.
Totally cool stuff; just not cheap.
posted by filmgeek at 1:50 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
Their units are also used for industrial needs in manufacturing. They have to have their sensors & lenses manufactured in very small runs - these are able to dump data to very high speed ram. Think if you wanted to buy the fastest CCD, with the greatest amount of light sensitivity and nobody made it...so you make it yourself.
Totally cool stuff; just not cheap.
posted by filmgeek at 1:50 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Well, looking at the phantom website, one of their cameras that gives its data throughput (the part that is probably the most expensive, I would think), says that it handles 16 gigapixels per second. That is 16 billion pixels per second. It also lists the pixel depth as 12 bits per pixel.
Multiplying 16 billion by 12, and then dividing by 8... means the camera produces 24GB of data every second. That's 24 billion bytes per second. That data has to be processed and stored.
Looking at an online pc store, their most expensive SSD can hold 256GB (so, a little over 10 seconds of footage), and has a continuous sustained write speed of 220MB/s, or 1% of the speed needed to store that data. It also costs $400+
If we simply look at memory, which tends to be faster, DDR2-1066, which is the fastest currently listed on wikipedia, has a peak transfer rate of 8.5GB/s. We are closer, but even that is still 1/3 of the speed needed to store the data.
As another point of throughput, the Large Hadron Collider, which had articles written about how it handles the huge amount of data, shows a peak data throughput of about 2.1GB/s.
All of these points should help see just how much information that camera produces. Each component in the chain has to stand up to that. Given the great answers above about the optics, combined with the data chain... 6 figures almost seems cheap to me.
posted by frwagon at 1:52 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
Multiplying 16 billion by 12, and then dividing by 8... means the camera produces 24GB of data every second. That's 24 billion bytes per second. That data has to be processed and stored.
Looking at an online pc store, their most expensive SSD can hold 256GB (so, a little over 10 seconds of footage), and has a continuous sustained write speed of 220MB/s, or 1% of the speed needed to store that data. It also costs $400+
If we simply look at memory, which tends to be faster, DDR2-1066, which is the fastest currently listed on wikipedia, has a peak transfer rate of 8.5GB/s. We are closer, but even that is still 1/3 of the speed needed to store the data.
As another point of throughput, the Large Hadron Collider, which had articles written about how it handles the huge amount of data, shows a peak data throughput of about 2.1GB/s.
All of these points should help see just how much information that camera produces. Each component in the chain has to stand up to that. Given the great answers above about the optics, combined with the data chain... 6 figures almost seems cheap to me.
posted by frwagon at 1:52 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
The sensors on these cameras require additional cooling as well. Their sensors are essentially "overclocked" and generate a lot of heat. They're also very big in the higher-end cameras (larger than 35mm full frame) in order to capture lots of light. Large sensors are very expensive due to yield problems (the larger the sensor, the more they have to throw out due to manufacturing defects).
posted by zsazsa at 2:00 PM on August 15, 2011
posted by zsazsa at 2:00 PM on August 15, 2011
Best answer: All the other factors list above are true but I'll throw in an extra one.
To capture frames at high speed, you need a sensor that can handle very little light and keep the noise level low. That means you need a big sensor. Sensors are made in a semicondutor process like CPUs and DRAM and all our other fun silicon gadgets. If you go read about yield in the semiconductor business, you'll see yield is directly related to the size of the chip. Big chips get terrible yield, so they cost more.
In other words, to get one big fat sensor like in the Phantom, they have to throw out more failed sensors to get a good one. If you're making a P&S camera, higher noise is fine so a smaller sensor is fine, so the chip yield is much better.
posted by chairface at 4:32 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
To capture frames at high speed, you need a sensor that can handle very little light and keep the noise level low. That means you need a big sensor. Sensors are made in a semicondutor process like CPUs and DRAM and all our other fun silicon gadgets. If you go read about yield in the semiconductor business, you'll see yield is directly related to the size of the chip. Big chips get terrible yield, so they cost more.
In other words, to get one big fat sensor like in the Phantom, they have to throw out more failed sensors to get a good one. If you're making a P&S camera, higher noise is fine so a smaller sensor is fine, so the chip yield is much better.
posted by chairface at 4:32 PM on August 15, 2011 [1 favorite]
If we simply look at memory, which tends to be faster, DDR2-1066, which is the fastest currently listed on wikipedia, has a peak transfer rate of 8.5GB/s.
That's a little bit of a distortion. For one, that's not nearly the fastest speed. DDR3 goes up to DDR3-2133 (PC3-17000) which is around 17 GB/s. And many motherboards are dual or triple-channel which means they can read/write to two or three banks simultaneously, meaning the effective bandwidth is 2x or 3x the rate of a single module. Really, the whole history of RAM for the last 7 or 8 years or so has just been about putting things in parallel and pipelining requests, not making memory itself faster. That "2133 MHz" DDR3 is only really running at 266 MHz, it's just that there are 8 modules working in parallel under the hood of the DIMM, just like like with RAID0 for hard drives. DDR3 = pipeline depth 8, DDR2 = depth 4, DDR = depth 2. Combine this with the 2x or 3x of dual or triple channel memory controller, and you've boosted your effective throughput anywhere from 2x to 24x the raw throughput of a single memory module. The RAM used on video cards just takes this to another level, resulting in things like GDDR5 with a bandwidth of 320 GB/s. This would work perfectly for something like a high speed camera where throughput is everything and latency is not an issue, so you would be able to achieve your extreme throughput with relatively standard and non-exotic parts.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:19 PM on August 15, 2011
That's a little bit of a distortion. For one, that's not nearly the fastest speed. DDR3 goes up to DDR3-2133 (PC3-17000) which is around 17 GB/s. And many motherboards are dual or triple-channel which means they can read/write to two or three banks simultaneously, meaning the effective bandwidth is 2x or 3x the rate of a single module. Really, the whole history of RAM for the last 7 or 8 years or so has just been about putting things in parallel and pipelining requests, not making memory itself faster. That "2133 MHz" DDR3 is only really running at 266 MHz, it's just that there are 8 modules working in parallel under the hood of the DIMM, just like like with RAID0 for hard drives. DDR3 = pipeline depth 8, DDR2 = depth 4, DDR = depth 2. Combine this with the 2x or 3x of dual or triple channel memory controller, and you've boosted your effective throughput anywhere from 2x to 24x the raw throughput of a single memory module. The RAM used on video cards just takes this to another level, resulting in things like GDDR5 with a bandwidth of 320 GB/s. This would work perfectly for something like a high speed camera where throughput is everything and latency is not an issue, so you would be able to achieve your extreme throughput with relatively standard and non-exotic parts.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:19 PM on August 15, 2011
(And BTW, you can buy SSDs that exceed 500 MB/s for less than $300 these days, as long as you have a 6 Gbit/s SATA port.)
posted by Rhomboid at 5:31 PM on August 15, 2011
posted by Rhomboid at 5:31 PM on August 15, 2011
Best answer: I bought some of their cameras for a previous company. The chips are custom-made for them by an E-European company they eventually bought outright (Hungarian mbe?), so they essentially cornered the extreme-high-end of high-speed camera technology... and all that comes at a price. Plus profit margin.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:29 AM on August 16, 2011
posted by IAmBroom at 11:29 AM on August 16, 2011
(Plus everything said above, about cooling, bandwidth, throughput, supply&demand...)
posted by IAmBroom at 11:29 AM on August 16, 2011
posted by IAmBroom at 11:29 AM on August 16, 2011
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