Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

350 Megapixel Camera

Posted by michael on from the eight-by-ten-glossies dept.

Remy Hathaway writes "Ars Technica just posted an article on the "MegaCam", a 350 megapixel camera. The original story is from the Honolulu Advertiser."

3 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Filesize of the pictures by neur0maniak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just imagine how big they'll be.. 350Mb(yes, megabits!) x 24bpp = 8.4Gb (Gigabits) = 1.05GB (Gigabytes). And that's without compression. How long would that take to compress, too?

    1. Re:Filesize of the pictures by lfourrier · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think we need some breakthrough in technology. I've heard about some technic using a silver based substrat. The file is written in parallel, using some light encoding. Total writing of the file can take as little as 1/1000 second. Calculate the througput, it is very impressing. Compression is lossy, and it is more similar to cd-r than to cd-rw, and long term stability is not guaranted. But give it a few years, and I'm sure we will have a solution derived from this principle.

  2. Additional info on their website... by stienman · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those too busy to go to their website:

    The imager is made up of 40 silicon imagers, each of which has two imaging surfaces on it, for a total of 80 channels of about 4.3 megapixels each. There are gaps between the silicon imagers. Images they make have black borders around them so that the image spatially is like looking through a window with bars. The imagers are rectangular, and are set up in a pattern somewhat like this

    .HHHHHHHHH
    HHHHHHHHHHH
    HHHHHHHHHHH
    .HHHHHHHHH
     The periods are due to slashdot's inability to do & nbsp;, & #160;, etc. The #'s I was going to use in place of H caused the lameness filter to spew "Too many junk characters." I guess I didn't realize I had a junk character account, nevermind that it is apparently overdrawn!

    It takes a full ten seconds to get the data from the sensors, and there is a rotating shutter above it. The time to take the image and then copy it off the array is long enough that they can only obtain about 1TB of data on a typical veiwing night.

    -Adam