Here we briefly summarize our long period experience of constructing and operating
wide-field monitoring cameras with sub-second temporal resolution to look for optical
components of GRBs, fast-moving satellites and meteors. General requirements for hardware
for such systems are discussed along with algorithms of real-time detection and
classification of various kinds of short optical transients. We also give a status report
on the next generation, multi-objective and transforming monitoring system, the
MegaTORTORA, whose 6-channel (Mini-MegaTORTORA-Spain) and 9-channel
prototypes (Mini-MegaTORTORA-Kazan) we are building now at SAO RAS. This system combines a
wide field of view with subsecond temporal resolution in monitoring regime, and is able to
reconfigure itself, in a fractions of second, to follow-up mode which has better
sensitivity and provides us with multi-color and polarimetric information on detected
transients simultaneously.