Camera recommendation?

Hi boys & girls!

Though being often discussed in the forums, I haven’t yet found the perfect camera for my purposes:

I am tracking lightsticks in a dark room using freeframe nodes.
The camera will be mounted in ca. 2,5 meters height capturing a room of ca. 3x3 meters.
So the cam should be able to handle relatively small light objects, and because these objects are moving quiet quickly, it should be not too slow.
Well, and because I’m a student it should not be too expensive…

If I got it right, firewire-cams are faster than their USB-pendants? But if I buy a USB-cam like the often mentioned “Philips SPC 900NC”, it has framerates of up to “90”. Is this realistic?

Can you recommend any cam solution that would fit my purposes?

Thanks,
Der Dani

hi dani.
about “not such money”, if you cant afford 300 to 400 euros from Imaging Source solid and powerfull cameras, those free projects links may interrest you:
leanXcam
if you got some time and have friends invested in Linux good fellow’s society, you may find this vvvvery interresting:
[http://www3.elphel.com/elphel project](http://www3.elphel.com/elphel project)
and its wiki
elffel project has got an extension at high speed

in general, you need between 30 and 60fps for nice tracking, or if your sticks are little, get a 1024x800 px cam at 25fps.
going up to 90 sounds for the moment not really nice.
cameras at 20fps/15fps may be affordable if you accept to use a damper mode to smooth all of the tracking stuff.
depends of the artistic finality .;-)

Hey karistouf,

thanks for your response and sorry for my late one - the last weeks before the launch were kind of veeery busy ;-)

I finally used the Sony PS3 EyeToy camera, stable 30fps for 40 Euros did the job quiet well! And the tracking results were much better than expected, yeah!

So thanks again, I lovvvve this forums!