hi, i'm looking for a camera for an installation which delivers:

- black and white (more precisely: greyscale, 8 bit) - HD (1280x720 is sufficient), progressive - @18 fps minimum, better 25 fps - works under macos and windows - is connected directly via firewire or usb (i do not want to use an expensive video i/o device as aja/matrox/blackmagic).

i googled around quite a bit and in the industrial area i found quite a few cameras which are able to deliver uncompressed HD-video over firewire or even usb (since it's only b/w the bus speeds seem sufficient) but these are built for machine vision and since i do not have any experience with these types of cameras i do wonder wether they are fit for normal (human) vision too. are the images comparable to the ones generated by normal hd-camcorders?

and what about software? i didn't find much information about drivers and nothing about compatibility with jitter...?

yeah, and one last thing to add to my wish list: the models i found are all 4:3 aspect ratio, whereas i would need 16:9 or even better something like cinemascope (2.2:1)... i can surely just crop the output but if there'd be a camera which does natively provide a format like this, it would be way better. or maybe there is a way to use these cameras with anamorphotic lenses (in that case: what about the beamer then?)?

i know, lots of questions... if anyone hase some experience with this or maybe can even point me to a model or a company (preferably in germany)? since i'm a little lost with that, any help is really much appreciated, thanks a lot in advance! karl