Decent consumer-grade with some high speed capability?

Budget?

You're asking a lot from a consumer-grade camcorder. Also shooting at 120 fps and playing it at 30 fps would be speeding it up not slowing it down. Slow motion video is played back at high framerates. 120fps would be the beginning of true slow motion. Most stuff you see on TV shows like mythbusters are shot usually at something like 500fps or faster and generally not in 1080p unless you just have enough money to get a Phantom Flex so you can shoot at 2500fps.

If you are serious about shooting at a high speed opposed to the incredibly cheap and poor quality of shooting at 60fps and using a plugin like twixtor to slow it down for you to create information that isnt actually there then i highly suggest not thinking in terms of what camera can you buy but more of what camera do you need to rent in order to accomplish this task. I say this because the camera you need to capture excellent quality high speed footage is not something any normal person can afford to buy and even most famous videographers dont own these but rent when needed.

That being said the very popular and small sized high speed production camera that I would suggest looking for a rental house that you can go to would be the Phantom Flex or Phantom HD Gold. Its not really big and intimidating like most cameras of this caliber are.


If this is something you are doing for fun and dont need to use the footage for professional application then your only option is with Casio. They make compact P&S cameras that do high speed video but i will warn you the faster the framerate the smaller the resolution as this is not a camera that can crank out beautiful super high speed video for anything other than to be watched on like youtube.

The starting price range for a truly high speed video camera for the use you are looking at starts in the $50,000 range and goes up over $150,000 very quickly. High speed video is a very specialized market and expensive because the cameras that do this are processing an unbelievable amount of information especially with most of them shooting at 1080p up to 4K.

hope that general explanation helps. Sorry if it comes off as slightly rude. hard to convey has specialized high speed video is through text on the internet. Just trying to give you the truth and basic info

Im sure there are a bunch in your state. not sure where olympia is. but yea high speed video is getting popular but is still something done by only higher budget productions.