For those people like me who use firewire cameras for planetary imaging, there's a new high-speed video camera on the horizon from point Grey Research, coming in April 2008.
It improves on the two critical aspects for planetary work - bit depth and bandwidth. The new camera is part of the "grasshopper" series and will have a 14 bit analogue to digital converter as well as 1394b (aka 800mbit) data rate.
Don't know about the price as yet, but I expect it will be *expensive*, like their other cameras. The new camera will use the Kodak KAI0340DM ccd, as used in their other camera the Dragonfly Express. I've owned a DX for the last 2 years and had a very good time with it, on the moon it sports framerates up to 240 fps :-)
I've registered my interest and will get one for evaluation as soon as they are available.
Any chance Point grey could reduce cost by talking an existing DFE camera and transferring its chip to the Grasshoper body?
Edit: sent them an email inquiry and disappointingly the answer is no for a chip transfer. BTW the pricing is not firm but the target price is approx 1195USD.
