Seitz's 160 Megapixel Digital Camera

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"

In a camera phone? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is not a digital camera

[denisbergeron]

It's a lens with a scanner !
Fast scanner, big resolution scanner!
But a lens with a scanner !

Re:In a camera phone? Why?

[DrDitto]

Diffraction ultimately limits the useful megapixels in digital photography. You cannot replace film/sensor area, and the economics of building large sensors will make them extremely expensive in the forseeable future.

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.

Re:This is not a digital camera

[dmatos]

denisbergeron is correct. If you look at the specs, it says the sensor is a "TDI" sensor. This sensor scans across the focal plane of the camera. It is 7500 pixels tall, with 2500 each R, G and B pixels. The full pixel colour is interpolated for each pixel.

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

[grahamsz]

These guys:

http://www.betterlight.com/products4X5.asp [betterlight.com]

Have been making high resolution scanning backs for large format cameras for years now.

Diffraction, shmiffraction...

[SnowDog74]

Negative Refractive Index [wikipedia.org]... specifically read the last paragraphs about superlenses and breaking the diffraction limit.

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.

150MPixels on 1"x1.5" = 35mm film

[davidwr]

I read an article a few years back rating film resolution. They used "Pro" 35mm cameras with the best available lenses at the time, a good tripod, and test-pattern images. The best films rated in at a bit over 100 line-pairs per millimeter. That's 100 black lines with 100 equally-sized white lines between them, or 200 dots per millimeter. When you digitize, you play it safe and double that number to 400 dots/mm.

400 dots/mm on 24mm X 36mm film is 9600x14400 dots, or 138.24 megapixels.

When we can squeeze 138.24 megapixels down to a 24mm X 36mm area, "we have arrived." I'm putting my money on this being available in high-end-yet-still-under-$2000 cameras by 2012.

By the way, for some applications, such as portraiture, 8 megapixels produces beautiful 20"x30" prints. However, some applications demand better, particularly those involving severe cropping and expanding.

Optical Limits On Miniaturization

[Steve B]

how long before we see this resolution in a mobile phone?

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.

Re:Optical Limits On Miniaturization

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The basic limit of resolution you can get is set by the Rayleigh criterion:

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 a single peak not two. Nonetheless, the intensity you get is still a function of the distance between the points and even when the points are much closer, the resulting intensity pattern is distinct from the pattern from a single point. All this means is that in order to clearly see two distinct points you need to do a bit of image processing to deconvolve the Airy disk. Digital cameras already apply image sharpening kernels so that's nothing fundamentally new.

So what I'm saying is that nothing special whatsoever happens at the Rayleigh angle. It just gets increasingly more difficult to produce good images at higher and higher resolution. These difficulties come from signal-to-noise ratio issues, not from 'diffraction limiting'.

Re:In a camera phone? Why?

[Achromatic1978]

Sure you do. But unless the grain of your film is fine enough, there's no point to drum scanning your image at 4000 dpi. I can scan a print out from a crappy dot matrix printer at 4000dpi too, but it means not a huge deal to the quality of the image.

That being said, I like the look of things like Phase One [phaseone.com]'s P 45 [phaseone.com] digital back for medium and large format cameras. 39 megapixels, 4:3 sensor, 50-400 ISO, 35 frames per minute.