Video cameras to capture vibratory motion

[floattuber]

One of our programs has money to burn and would like to buy our lab a video camera to capture motion during our vibe tests. Currently, we are using an old digital still camera to take short clips of motion while using a strobe light. This arrangement works OK and does show motion, but has it's limitations. Obviously, there's aliasing with the strobe, but this is surprisingly not that bad of a problem. More of a problem is the long focal length and small video images. We'd like to capture motion of small parts like wires, tabs, pins, etc.

A high speed camera is out of the price range so we're stuck with consumer priced video cameras. So in that regard, perhaps this isn't so much of an engineering question but maybe some of you have had experience in this area.

I know nothing about video cameras and have never even touched one. Anybody have suggestions on what features to look for in a camera?

 

[electricpete]

There is a surprisingly fast cheap consumer camera available from Casio:
thread237-246142

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[floattuber]

Very nice. Thank you for the link.