Elphel is an open hardware and open source camera designed by Elphel Inc. primarily for scientific applications, though due to its both open hardware and open source camera software, FLOSS

Floss

Floss may refer to:* Dental floss, used to clean teeth* Embroidery thread, machine or hand-spun yarn for embroidery* Fairy floss or candyfloss, alternative names for cotton candy* Rousong, i.e. meat floss-Computing:...

 it can easily be customised for many different applications. Elphel Inc. was founded in 2001 by the Russian physicist Andrey Filippov  who migrated to the United States of America in 1995.
The current model is named "Elphel 353".

On the 6th December, 2010 Elphel launched their first panoramic camera solution (that is publicly available) called "Elphel Eyesis". Eyesis can be seen as the successor (designed for low parallax) of the camera rig Elphel Inc. developed for Google Street View

Google Street View

Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world...

Future Applications

The camera is being worked on to achieve a digital cinema

Digital cinema

Digital cinema refers to the use of digital technology to distribute and project motion pictures. A movie can be distributed via hard drives, optical disks or satellite and projected using a digital projector instead of a conventional film projector...

 camera solution with the Apertus Project, this project is being done by a group of enthusiasts and moviemakers worldwide, the project is in the prototype stage.

Applications

Elphel cameras are being used to capture images for Google Street View

Google Street View

Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world...

 and the Google Books project and are used in a Global Hawk UAV

Unmanned aerial vehicle

An unmanned aerial vehicle , also known as a unmanned aircraft system , remotely piloted aircraft or unmanned aircraft, is a machine which functions either by the remote control of a navigator or pilot or autonomously, that is, as a self-directing entity...

 operated by NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

. The Moss Landing Marine Laboratories

Moss Landing Marine Laboratories

The Moss Landing Marine Laboratories is a multi-campus marine research consortium headquartered at Moss Landing, California.-Organization:...

 use Elphel cameras in their project called Submersible Capable of Under Ice Navigation and Imaging (SCINI) - a NSF

NSF

-Politics:* National Service Framework, any of a series of British government policies on medical care* National Socialist Front, a Swedish Nazi party* NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party...

-funded research project for robotic under the sea ice for surveying and exploration in Antarctica. The Franken camera F2 developed by Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

uses the Elphel 10383 sensor front-end. .