Seitz's 160 Megapixel Digital Camera 207
An anonymous reader writes "Digital cameras had been lagging behind Moores law for a while, but Seitz has taken a massive step forward with their announcement of a 160 Megapixel digital camera! At almost 20" long, with a price tag of around $36,000, and with on-board gigabit ethernet to copy off the image it's not exactly going to take on the consumer market, but how long before we see this resolution in a mobile phone?
Even with todays current range of digital cameras massive images are possible — such as the amazing 720 Megapixel image of Sydney Harbour"
Even with todays current range of digital cameras massive images are possible — such as the amazing 720 Megapixel image of Sydney Harbour"
FT submission (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough with stupid tag questions already! Would submitters and editors please stop with this insanity - we don't need to be *led* into a discussion, we're good enough already.
Re:FT submission (Score:5, Funny)
Re:FT submission (Score:5, Funny)
In a camera phone? Why? (Score:2, Informative)
megapixels without good non-fixed lens == pissing away bits.
Makes for great marketing though. Let them megahur^H^H^Hpixels fly! See, the megahurtz race didn't come back to bite the industry too hard, so no reason to learn.
Re:In a camera phone? Why? (Score:5, Informative)
I use a 4x5" large-format film camera. With 20 in^2 of film area and a flatbed scanner capable of 2400dpi, I get 115 megapixels. A drum scan at 4000dpi gives me 320 megapixels if I wanted. And because the sensor is huge, diffraction doesn't hurt me unless I stop down my lens to f45 or f64.
Now many say you can get this quality through stitching dozens of digital captures together....if that is your sort of thing.
Diffraction, shmiffraction... (Score:5, Informative)
We're not talking science fiction. The concept has been tested in practical application and yielded orders of clarity beyond the diffraction limits of the wavelengths of light being captured.
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http://www.betterlight.com/products4X5.asp [betterlight.com]
Yes, not the least expensive device, and it requires infrastructure, but for $10K you get 36mp @ 48-bit, 12-stops of DR.
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I don't know....it looks like it could be a new N-Gage. I mean, in that picture, it kinda does look like he's Sidetalkin [sidetalkin.com]
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It was just a necessary stage in the development of the CPU. Now that avenue has been exhausted, they've moved on to multi-cores. How have they been bitten? What should they have learnt?
What is it about the lens on this camera that makes you think it isnt good enough to back up the CCD? oh wait i just read your subject - you think they've made a $36,000 camera phone! hahahahahaha
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Another problem is that lots of that research was about clock speed specifically, so they've got lots of techniques and data lying around focused on it that can't be taken further. Also it seems that engineers made their careers based on
Not even 1Gp. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not even 1Gp. (Score:5, Interesting)
While not a gigapixel sensor, there is a guy that stitched together a gigapixel image from 196 digital photos, and he did this 3 years ago.
http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel.htm [tawbaware.com]
Educated guess (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Educated guess (Score:5, Funny)
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Got me
That or I'm blind....
-nB
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Re:Educated guess (Score:5, Funny)
The world's friendliest DDoS . . . . . . (Score:5, Funny)
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Just an idea... (Score:2)
May I be the first non-cynical /.er.. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not a digital camera (Score:5, Informative)
Fast scanner, big resolution scanner!
But a lens with a scanner !
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Re:This is not a digital camera (Score:5, Informative)
I think it's neat that they use the same "digital back" module on a 360 degree panoramic camera. The camera rotates at a constant rate, and the sensor can then capture the 360 degree image.
The only thing to watch out for with the 160MPix camera is the rolling shutter. One side of the image will be captured almost immediately, but the other side will be captured 1 second later (at max speed, max resolution). With moving subjects, this can lead to lots of strange image artefacts - squishing or stretching, multiple images, etc. Their website has a couple of images where this effect has been used artistically, but a tripod would be absolutely required to take a decent image of a still subject.
It's not even new (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.betterlight.com/products4X5.asp [betterlight.com]
Have been making high resolution scanning backs for large format cameras for years now.
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cameraphones (Score:2)
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Random onlooker : WTF is that blurry mess ?
You : Art.
Random onlooker : Ah. Nice.
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What is its dynamic range? (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you would like to improve the dynamic range, I would suggest applying oversampling post-shooting. You want 10^6 levels? Great. Let's approximate that as 2^20. Now, take the existing 2^8. Every doubling of pixels you combine into (averaging them) one adds one bit to each colour plane. Take the 160Mpx and decimate it to 39kpx, and you will have your dynamic range
Perhaps being more realistic with this unrealistic hardware, you could decimate the picture down to about 4Mpx, giving you a dynamic rang
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So you throttle down your aperture to make sure the highest intensity recorded is just t
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Linux support out of the box (Score:2)
Even the portable control device is apparently by default a Sharp Zaurus.
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You know, I'm tired of seeing people who say stuff like this. For the vast majority of uses, Linux + GIMP + gThumb and/or Picasa is just fine for professional photographers. Yes, there are a few things that GIMP doesn't do or doesn't
It's not CMYK either. (Score:2)
Brace for the pr0n jokes (Score:3, Funny)
For the love of God, or at least the server (Score:2)
It's the lens stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Add all the pixels you want, without a bigger and better lens it doesn't matter.
Sure we can improve on the dynamic range and noise of the sensor, but the megapixel days are over.
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The sensor size, bigger is better but also more expensive
The heat dissipation of the sensor, so you don't get insane noise/deformation on long poses (astrophotography for example)
I'm still shooting film (Leica SL and Rollei SL66) most of the time, as until very recently it was hard to beat those cameras with decently priced DSLRs. On paper, 10Mpx DSLR isn't as good as professionally drum-scanned 6x6 negatives. However the gap isn't as
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The digital camera's lens could be the most expensive, impractical lens o
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i found waldo (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory Dans Data "Enough already.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'd love more pixels (Score:2, Interesting)
That would open up for a completely different kind of photography. Put this in a mobile phone, and take one of those boring pictures of your friend looking very uninteresting on the bus, but now in the same picture you may find an interesting scene happenin
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My guess (Score:2)
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Comes with a mac mini! (Score:2)
What's the point? (Score:2)
At best computer monitors have a resolution of 1600x1200, so without significantly zooming out, you can never display the entire picture on the screen. Printing is the only area where more Mpixels are needed, but even there, at 8.5x11 8-16 Mpixel images are crisp enough. There ARE areas where extremely
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No one will ever need more that 640k.
I'm sure many people "in the know" agreed with Mr. Gates when he said this. As much as we like to beat poor Bill up over this statement the truth is that I'm sure people are nodding their heads in agreement with you but, unless you have some serious insight into this issue, I can't say I agree with the whole "there is no use for it" crowd. I'd guess if you'd have that much insi
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http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates [wikiquote.org]
" *
o Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates has repeatedly denied ever saying this:
I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping
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8.5x11 is hardly the largest size print people might want to make, though.
Sure, but one could argue that they only are not at the
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Ahh you forget my 23" Apple Cinema HD display adds some pixels on the vertical for total of 1920x1200
And if it weren't for the fact that I require multiple monitors, I would have gone for a 30" HD Cinema Display
which displays 2560x1600 pixels. A bit better than your quoted best resolution...
But you're probably on a Windows or Linux box and don't consider the offerings for Mac much. But we are here
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Panoramic Camera (Score:2)
TMPI - Too Much Personal Information (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that I will *not* be taking pictures of my coworkers with this. I don't want to see anyone I know in that kind of detail. My most of my co-workers look like this [photobucket.com] anyway. Why would I want a closer-in shot to see the pores, etc.
2 cents,
QueenB
Not gonna happen (Score:2)
I do realize that the future will bring us things that we simply cannot understand the use of today, such as computers exceeding today's super computers. But I doubt that just because the tech is going to be there, that we will see 160 MP consumer cams. Eventually, people will stop hearing megapixel and instead listen to other intuitive features. Maybe built-in software with 3D depth readability and such?
Scanners are about the same. Back
Not a 720 Megapixel Camera (Score:2)
To be fair ~ That image was made with 169 images from a Canon EOS 10D [dpreview.com] that has 6.3 Megapixels and then the multiple images were stitched together [docbert.org] using AutPan Pro [autopano.net].
Nice but... (Score:4, Funny)
I would love to own one, though.
"how long?..." (Score:2)
long.
Storage first, cameraphones second (Score:2)
Obligatory adolescent humor (Score:2)
megapixels don't matter! (Score:2)
Thank guys. (Score:5, Funny)
150MPixels on 1"x1.5" = 35mm film (Score:2, Informative)
400 dots/mm on 24mm X 36mm film is 9600x14400 dots, or 138.24 megapixels.
When we can squeeze
I can't imagine what for (Score:2)
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And for the record, I am a recovering Sinar (p2) snob myself. DAMN fine 4x5.
Batteries (Score:2)
How about focusing on . . . (Score:2)
No need of $35k for large images (Score:2)
Now, thats a deal.. Scanning medium and large format transparency gives fantastic images when scanned; you can the advantages of film (tones, size, and free 70 years backup o
Boom? (Score:2)
Optical Limits On Miniaturization (Score:5, Informative)
Never. The basic limit of resolution you can get is set by the Rayleigh criterion:
sin theta = 1.22 * wavelength / lens diameter
where theta is the angular diameter of the smallest detail that can be resolved.
Using a 5*10^-7 m (green light, more or less in the middle of the visible spectrum) and a 0.01 m diameter lens (which is generous for a mobile phone), this gives us a 3.5*10^-3 degree angle as the minimum amount of viewfield that can be covered by one pixel. Thus, a picture with a 20 degree viewfield* would be, at most, 5700 pixels in each dimension, or 32.5 megapixels.
*Of course, a viewfield could be wider, but getting a wider-angle picture without distortion raises a whole other batch of problems if you have to do it in such a small package.
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There's nothing 'basic' about this completely empirical law. What we see with a camera is, roughly, a convolution of a 'perfect' image with the Airy disc. If you convolve an image that consists solely of two points then when the angular separation of the points is less than roughly the angle set by Rayleigh's criterion you end up with a function with a single central peak rather than two distinct peaks. So naively you end up with
In reply to the Tag (Score:2)
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Re:I have seen it! (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, nothing like seeing the pores on the mole on Ron Jeremy's butt.
Re:Moore's law has what to do with this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If the gaps between the pixels are getting larger, yeah... but if you have four pixels that are quarter the size, they receive quarter of the amount of light in the same amount of time... put the four together, and you end up with the same amount of light, no?
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Longer exposures overcome this limitation. It's kind of like using a stopwatch. How precicely can you measure a millisecond? How about a second? A minute? Your measuring error is pretty consistant no matter what len
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With a 10um x 10um pixel, you'll collect (say) 100,000 electrons at a certain exposure time. This translates to a digital number of 1024 (or whatever). If each pixel is
Re:Moore's law has what to do with this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seitz: 160 megapixel in a 60x170mm sensor = 15,686 pixels per mm^2
1Ds: 11.4 MP in a 35.8x23.8mm sensor = 13,379 pixels per mm^2
Rebel: 6.3 MP in a 22.7x15.1mm sensor = 18,379 pixels per mm^2
The digital rebel has a higher pixel density than the Seitz. According to your quote, that makes the Seitz more responsive than the rebel but less than the 1Ds.
Like usual around here, the invocation of Moore is just to get
(I prefer Canon so substitute in your preferred cameras where you see fit.)
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