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"

Not even 1Gp.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem. Gigapxl Project [gigapxl.org].

What is its dynamic range?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

What is the big point in churning up the pixel count, if the dynamic range is the same old 1.0e03? Human retina has a dynamic range 1.0e06, three orders of magnitude better. And it has about 2.7 million rod cells and cone cells. One can create amazing speakers with absolutely perfect sound fidelity at 150 KHz, but human ear cant hear it. There could be some applications not involving human hearing/cdplayers/boom boxes. But at that point it is not really a "speaker". Same way at 160e06 pixels or 720e06 pixels it is not a "digital camera". It is some exotic machine with really pathetic dynamic range and huge number of pixels.

Obligatory Dans Data "Enough already..

[mr_stinky_britches]

I highly recommend giving Dans "Enough already with the megapixels [dansdata.com]" article a read. He explains the situation more clearly than I ever could.

Re:In a camera phone? Why?

[OverlordQ]

Where'd the camera phone come from? Did you even RTFA? I dont know about you but this doesn't look like a camera phone to me [roundshot.ch]

Re:Moore's law has what to do with this?

[rjstanford]

This is why even a pretty good 6MP sensor - like, say, a Nikon D50 today - can produce much better pictures than a crappy 8MP point-n-shoot camera sensor does. By better I mean cleaner, less noisy, with more realistic color, etc, etc. Even with good lenses, the tiny sensors just aren't getting the light information they need to do well.

Re:It's the lens stupid

[EvilAlphonso]

Quality glass is important, but you left out some other important aspects:
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 big as one would think for most applications. Add to that the incoming pricing war in the prosumer market and I'm ripe for the switch (getting a Pentax K10D in November, with K-R adapter rings for my leica lenses).

I also honestly believe they will increase the megapixel count on full-framed sensors as there is demand for that in the pro market. For the sensors in P&S and phone cameras, I couldn't care less as it has been purely marketing gimmicks for some years now. :)

Re:Not even 1Gp.

[LordKronos]

Ummm...call it what they like, but that's scanned film.

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]

Re:Moore's law has what to do with this?

[MasterC]

...the smaller you make them, the less responsive they are.

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 /. editors to accept the story. The density has clearly been exceeded by *much* cheaper cameras. The only thing novel here is the 11.97 time increase in sensor area over the 1Ds......well, and the gigabit ethernet but... :)

(I prefer Canon so substitute in your preferred cameras where you see fit.)

I'd love more pixels

[dk-software-engineer]

My dream is to have a fisheye-lens and a wicked amount of detail. That way I can take a picture without knowing exactly what I'm photographing. When I get home I can find many interesting high resolution photos of stuff I didn't even see when I was there.

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 happening on the side walk.

Yeah yeah, it might not be worth the time once you get used to it, but I'd sure like to try.

Re:In a camera phone? Why?

[fithmo]

Or just do traditional, analog prints in a darkroom and get higher resolution than any digital photographer's or printer's wet dream (or dry dreams, noting the lack of wet-work).

Re:In a camera phone? Why?

[DrDitto]

I still print my 4x5" B&W negatives optically using a 70-year old enlarger that I picked up at a garage sale for $50. Although I've seen very impressive B&W inkjet prints using special inks, I think my optical prints are sharper. That said, I do color prints digitally with my local lab's LightJet. I've done optical RA-4 prints before, but I think digital color printing offers too many advantages. Plus I like shooting transparency film and making positive-to-positive prints using Cibachrome is expensive and difficult.

Re:In a camera phone? Why?

[fithmo]

Way to be! :)

I'm strictly a home-made ghetto bathroom b&w guy myself. Your enlarger sounds quite a bit like mine, although mine might be a little younger. My youngest piece of photographic equipment, though, hails from 1972 (imaging equipment, I have a new tripod and some other things).

I did one term of color work in school and decided the color darkroom was for the birds (and, more importantly, for computers). All my color is done digitally, but I also tend to call my color images "snapshots" and my silver images "photographs".

I strongly agree that "digital color printing offers too many advantages", I just had to make the point about traditional techniques - I'm defensive of them in the hopes that my chem and paper prices don't go up much more.

Storage device - Mac mini !

[guzi]

Apart from the fact that the controlling device is a Zaurus (or other PDA), did you guys notice that the storage device is a Mac mini ???

Storage device: Portable Mac Mini 1.66Hz Intel Core Duo (2 MB Cache, 2 GB RAM, Mac OS X, Windows XP)

G.