The first digital high-speed video camera was developed in 1989. For about thirty years since then, the highest frame rate has exponentially increased from about 10³ fps to 10⁸ fps, and will reach 10⁹ to 10¹⁰ fps in the very near future. The evolution has been supported by successive innovations of the technology, such as: (1) since the middle of 1980s, solid-state image sensors enabling parallel and partial readout, (2) since 1989, digital high-speed video cameras with a separate digital recording box, (3) since 1996, burst image sensors with pixels each equipped with the in-situ memories or the pixel-based memories in the periphery of the sensor chip, and (4) since 2011, backside-illuminated and 3D-stacked high-speed image sensors. The history is reviewed, including on-going works. Ultimately, how fast can silicon image sensors operate? The solution is purely theoretically derived and presented.

We have developed an ultrahigh-speed, high-sensitivity broadcast camera that is capable of capturing clear, smooth slow-motion videos even where lighting is limited, such as at professional baseball games played at night. First, we developed an ultrahigh-speed broadcast color camera using three 80,000-pixel ultrahigh-speed, high-sensitivity CCDs. This camera had about ten times the sensitivity of standard high-speed cameras, and enabled an entirely new style of presentation for sports broadcasts and science programs.

  In this paper, we discuss our experimental development aimed at improving the resolution of ultrahigh-speed camera even further: a new ultrahigh-speed high-sensitivity CCD that increases the number of pixels four-fold to 300,000 pixels, and a single-chip color camera mounting this CCD.

The high-speed camera using the burst image sensor can take the high definition images at the high recording speed that is much faster than a high-speed camera using a conventional consecutive read-out image sensor. This report gives an outline by the positioning of the burst method in high-speed camera and introduces kinds of the burst image sensor, and the principle of the burst image sensor.

Furthermore, this report introduces some applications that fit to the high-speed camera using the burst image sensor such as shock wave, materials testing, and fuel injection.

High speed camera is widely used to observe various behavior. In some of the ultra- high speed phenomena such as discharge and shockwave etc. requires more than 10M fps and as the temporal resolution of the solid-state imaging sensor is not sufficient enough, Multi-Channel based Ultra-High speed camera is used instead.

This article describes the overview of the shooting principle by a Multi-Channel Ultra-High speed camera and its application.

High-speed imaging is a powerful tool for studying dynamic phenomena and has played a critical role in discovery of fast processes. Sequentially timed all-optical mapping photography (STAMP), which was reported in 2014, is a method for capturing ultrafast events on picosecond and femtosecond timescales without repetitive measurement. The operation of STAMP is based on the image mapping from time domain to spatial domain with spectral manipulation techniques. To realize it, here we introduce two types of STAMP cameras: STAMP with spectral shaper and STAMP utilizing spectral filtering. STAMP with spectral shaper we developed can take motion pictures with 6 frames. To show the utility, we used it to obtain motion pictures of phonon-polariton dynamics, which was previously difficult to observe with conventional methods in a single shot. STAMP utilizing spectral filtering is an improved configuration for capturing 25 frames of ultrafast dynamics. We used it to monitor the plasma dynamics with the frame rate of 4.35 Tfps.

In recent year, the performance improvement of high-speed camera is remarkable and to measure the physical quantities from the image has become common method. Previously, the measurement method images has been used mainly for the "amplitude", "wavelength". In recent years, the new measurement method using the "polarization" actively has been developed. In this paper, we introduce some measurement examples using the latest high-speed camera to explain the trend.