Is there any other reason for those cameras' great performance besides ASIC?
mallocanswer
@zvonryan, what inside of Nikon camera is not just an ASIC chip. You can find more information here.
cmusam
Is processing speed the bottle neck of burst-mode FPS? I read that "before photos get written to the memory card, they are first stored to a small amount of internal memory in the camera called a buffer." Could this buffer size be the bottleneck?
kayvonf
@cmusam. Nice question, let's try and reason through it.
Imagine that:
A camera has a 64MB memory buffer for storing post-processed burst mode photos like you suggest.
A camera could process photos (e.g., process and JPG compress them) with throughput 30 fps. And it can save processed photos out to flash at 20 fps. Assuming you wanted an infinitely long sequence of photos in your burst mode, what would be the limiting factor for burst mode FPS in this case?
Now imagine that in addition to processing photos with rate 30 fps, saving photos at rate 20 fps, you were told the camera can read 1MB RAW images off the sensor at 200 fps. How would you design the system to achieve a 200 fps burst, and what is the maximum number of photos that could be taken in a burst?
Is there any other reason for those cameras' great performance besides ASIC?
@zvonryan, what inside of Nikon camera is not just an ASIC chip. You can find more information here.
Is processing speed the bottle neck of burst-mode FPS? I read that "before photos get written to the memory card, they are first stored to a small amount of internal memory in the camera called a buffer." Could this buffer size be the bottleneck?
@cmusam. Nice question, let's try and reason through it.
Imagine that:
Now imagine that in addition to processing photos with rate 30 fps, saving photos at rate 20 fps, you were told the camera can read 1MB RAW images off the sensor at 200 fps. How would you design the system to achieve a 200 fps burst, and what is the maximum number of photos that could be taken in a burst?