Think your 9 megapixel camera is cool?

[Hivetyrant]

Well, it's not anymore

LONDON — Dalsa Semiconductor has fabricated an image sensor with more than 111 million pixels. The company claims the 4 x 4-inch charge-coupled device, configured as 10,560 x 10,560 pixels, is the world's highest-resolution image sensor and the first to break the 100 million-pixel barrier. Dalsa, a division of Dalsa Corp. (Waterloo, Ontario), said it has delivered the chip to Semiconductor Technology Associates (STA; San Juan Capistrano, Calif.). STA developed the chip for the Astrometry Department of the U.S. Naval Observatory with funding from the Navy's Small Business Innovation Research program. Dalsa manufactured the device for STA at its wafer fabrication facility in Bromont, Quebec.

[Bozos of Bones]

What exactly do you need to process a 111 megapixel image?

[Hivetyrant]

A nuclear power plant?

[Harkoliar]

gee.. so a 100mb sd card would only have a capacity of 8-9 pics.. no thanks lol

[Thoran]

Most of those cameras are used in spy satellites... because they're REALLY expensive. A couple years ago we bought a 4k x 4k camera that was at the time the highest resolution you could get... it was $70k. The other problem with camera's this size is that the optics cost more than the sensor. Think of how expensive lenses for medium format camera's are... and this camera has a 4 INCH sensor.

There are a LOT of applications for these sorts of resolution, hell the last 4 systems I've built all had image analysis problems with far larger data sets than 110mb. The system I'm building now takes multi-terrabyte images, of course you don't STORE that image... you process it and throw away 99.9% of it in realtime... so it's not really like a camera... although you COULD store the image if you for some reason wanted to (and had the disk space). The other difference is that for large area imagery you end up taking multiple images and stitching them together... since there is no single imager large enough (even this 10k x 10k one is too small for many applications).

[ 07-12-2006, 08:36 AM: Message edited by: Thoran ]

[wellard]

My Camera is cooler than your sig Hivetyrant [img]tongue.gif[/img]


WTF! Neil Sedaka ??? just don't tell me he is hip again

[ 07-13-2006, 09:46 PM: Message edited by: wellard ]

[Winter Wolf]

Okaay, but a 111 million pixel camera is useless to me unless it has good OPTICAL zoom. Digital zoom offends me for some reason. Also, if I wanted to make good use of that many pixels in my images, I'd need a hell of a lot bigger monitor screen than I've got or am planning on getting. So not to burst anyone's bubble, but it just ain't that cool in my eyes.

[Harkoliar]

nowadays its pretty standard to have a 3x optical zoom then add a couple digital zoom with it

[Winter Wolf]

Well the thing is, my digital camera has 8x optical zoom and 3x digital zoom. At the time it was kind of expensive at the time, but it's paid for itself at least three times over. As for why I'm so keen on a quality, high zoom factor, let me just ask this: do you *really* want to get that close to a grizzly bear in the wild?