The headline seems entirely accurate.

> Using current imaging techniques, measurements taken with ultrashort laser pulses must be repeated many times, which is appropriate for some types of inert samples, but impossible for other more fragile ones. [...] The first time it was used, the ultrafast camera broke new ground by capturing the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time (Fig. 2). This process was recorded in 25 frames taken at an interval of 400 femtoseconds and detailed the light pulse's shape, intensity, and angle of inclination.

Note that what we want to observe with those cams are very short, transient phenomenons. When I was doing my internship at a particle accelerator called GANIL, we were only recording 0.5 second, which already represented close to 1TB worth of raw data. It takes months to interpret and analyze results.

EDIT: typo

That doesn't seem to make sense, but imagine this. You want to shoot 100 frames of the first millisecond of an airsoft pellet leaving a gun, but you have a camera that only shoots around 2 frames per second.

Your airsoft gun shoots 1 ball exactly (1ns accuracy) every second, exactly the same velocity and direction.

You have your camera, that only captures 2 frames every second, but this camera has an insane shutter speed, 1 microsecond, and has a shutter with that you can time to the gun exactly.

You can also delay the release of the shutter by 1 microsecond increments.

So, you start by taking 1 picture, 10 microseconds after you shoot your pellet. Then in the next second, 20 microseconds, you do this 100 times. You stitch this all together, and you have a video in super slow motion of an airsoft pellet leaving a gun. It just happens to be 100 different airsoft pellets.

> Using current imaging techniques, measurements taken with ultrashort laser pulses must be repeated many times, which is appropriate for some types of inert samples, but impossible for other more fragile ones.

The new innovation here actually records the frames right after each other of one single event:

> The first time it was used, the ultrafast camera broke new ground by capturing the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time (Fig. 2). This process was recorded in 25 frames taken at an interval of 400 femtoseconds and detailed the light pulse’s shape, intensity, and angle of inclination.

Apologies for my tone

The technique described in the paper is different from that....

    > Thus far, established ultrafast imaging
    > techniques either struggle to reach the
    > desired exposure time or require repeatable
    > measurements. We have developed 
    > single-shot 10-trillion-frame-per-second 
    > compressed ultrafast photography (T-CUP),
    > which passively captures dynamic events with
    > 100-fs frame intervals in a single camera exposure.

It is frequently editors who write the headline, and it might even be editors who weren't involved in the reporting. Editors are always writing headlines with a balance of different motives and goals. Strict accuracy isn't always on the top of that list.

> The first time it was used, the ultrafast camera broke new ground by capturing the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time (Fig. 2). This process was recorded in 25 frames taken at an interval of 400 femtoseconds and detailed the light pulse's shape, intensity, and angle of inclination.

Obviously they're only recording extremely small timeframes with this setup, but it is indeed real time.

The fact that "statement A does not imply statement B" itself does not mean "statement A implies statement B is false".

Just because the phrase "X can run at 12 miles per hour" does not imply that "X can run 12 miles in an hour", it does not mean the ummonk was claiming that no one can run 12 miles in an hour.

1 / (400 femtoseconds) = 2 500 000 000 000 hertz

So definitely in the "trillion fps" for a very short period of time with multiple frames.

It's almost like they are underselling it?

EDIT: I'm responding here to the parent poster's claim, not to the original article. For more information on the technique used in the article, see this other article[0] about "CUP" vs this article about "T-CUP". In CUP they use a random 2D sampling of a scene projected onto a streak camera.

[0] https://www.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_26/december_201...

Turns out the research is super cool and the paper is well written and interesting but it's not what I thought.