The Fastcam Ultima APX was the worlds' fastest camera until 2006; despite this, the Ethernet version I have has some of the slowest image download times I've seen in a $100K camera, taking almost an an hour to save the 8GB of images in internal RAM.
My copy has a rather rough history; I acquired it with a heavily fogged sensor glass for practically nothing. Unfortunately, getting to the sensor glass required removing the sensor from its socket; furthermore, I made the mistake of trying to superglue the glass back on, which resulted in the sensor glass fogging over and requiring a second disassembly. Remarkably, despite all this, no pins were bent and no bond wires were broken. After running sans cover glass for about a year, I finally installed a behind-the-mount filter made of Schott BG-40, which worked wonders for color balance.
Furthermore, my controller had a dead composite output, and required a bit of Wiresharking to find the IP address (which was not set at the factory default). To salt the wounds, automatic IP address detection does not work in PFV on the 100BaseT cameras; the address has to be set manually in the PFV configuration. Very importantly, attempting to start PFV before the camera has finished booting causes the software to lose the ability to connect to the camera until the control box is rebooted, which was the source of many many hours of frustration.
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