Slow motion technology has been making huge leaps into affordability recently, and now that the Casio Exilim EX-F1 (check the review on luminous-landscape.com) is publicly available, youtube has suddenly been flooded with new high-FPS content, and I think we can safely say that slow-mo has hit the mainstream.

With Sony’s CMOS cameras we’ve had affordable slow-motion available for over a year, but the tape-based workflow was time-consuming and unintuitive, so required a bit too much effort for the general home user. However, the EX-F1 records to SD card, so you can post your captured files directly to youtube, and we’re seeing the results of that right now.

600FPS really seems to be the sweet spot for this camera, it’s getting into the realm of serious slow motion, but still has a reasonable amount of resolution available - 512×384 - absolutely perfect for Youtube or VJing.

High speed video is rapidly getting more accessible. In late 2006 a camera which could do 500FPS would set you back US$8800 (or $350/day rental). Now, the newest addition to the high-speed-cameras-for-normal-people - the Casio EX-F1 is shooting at up to 1200FPS, for $1000.

Of course, it’s a still camera as well, and it records 1080i and 720p footage, but I didn’t put “slow motion” up there in the title of this post to talk about boring old 30FPS.

The EX-F1 encodes straight to H264, so none of the shoot-wait-shoot behavior of my Sony tape-based HVR-V1P, and it doesn’t seem to have the same 3/6/12 second real-time limit. Like the Sony, slow-motion causes a loss of frame size: 300FPS gives you a reasonable 512×384 (considerably better than the effective resolution I tested from the HVR-V1P), 600FPS drops you to a youtube-esq 432×192, and 1200FPS gives you 336×96.

As seen in the above video, a little creative framing and editing will let you work with this limitation, but it looks like we still have a while to wait before we can mix full-frame slow motion video in to our projects. 512×384 is definitely useable though, and can give some beautiful results:

More Videos and Information:
Spud Gun destroying Eggs on Gizmodo.
Tomato Violence on Gizmodo.
Casio EX-F1 on Youtube.
Full Review on Gizmodo.

(not surprisingly, via Gizmodo Video)