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70 Megapixel Webcam
Alien54 writes "Small swiss company RoundShot has released an interesting new item, the 360 internet Livecam. The Livecam is a digital 360 camera, capable of 70 megapixels. The Swiss company claims the Roundshot Livecam uses a high-resolution digicam designed for pro photography, as well as slit-scan technology, which apparently allows for 'seamless panoramas' of up to 360 degrees. The cam is also capable of a high zoom factor, zooming up to 20x. Apparently, the cam has 'far-reaching" applications, most importantly in tourism, weather stations, corporate websites, airports, sports clubs, construction sites and private residences.'"
Just in case you're wondering if you can afford this camera: According to a PDF called "Press release 11-6-2004 (42 kB)" in the article (no direct links permitted), the price is 9600 Swiss francs (CHF). This converts to 7,642.71 USD.
More confusing: "Presentation to the press 11-6-2004 (1,059 kB)" indicates that shooting a full cylinder takes 20 to 120 seconds. However, the data output rate is only 1 MBps, and it can shoot only 5 high-resolution (4.5 MB) images per day or 80 low-resolution (100 KB) images per day. Who can make sense out of these conflicting rates?
It goes for 9,600 CHF which is about $7,715 US. :)
Looks like I won't be getting one right away
So the camera spins on it's internal axis to capture a single image that is freakin huge. Ok... that is great... actually kinda cool.
But it's NOT really a 70 megapixel camera it can't take all those 70 megapixels at one time.
That would be like producing a digital camera that would shift it's lens really really fast in the 4 diagonal directions to piece together an image that was 4 times the original size.
I think they are going for marketing points on this one. What is honestly stoping a camera company from putting out a camera that actually shoots at 5MP but they double the image size and interpolate the subpixels and say it's a 10MP camera?
When I grab stuffs off the internet at 72dpi and I need to enlarge it, I use the same technique. I just think the whole MP thing is becoming just like the MHZ craze that started when AMD tossed the Athlon on the market.
"Yay! I've got a 1 billion megapixel digital camera!" - User after learning how to resize photos in Photoshop CS
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
Panoguide lists dozens of programs that will stitch still photos together to create a panorama. Instead of spending $7k on RoundShot, one could buy a really good digital camera and tripod, then take the shots manually. A 5 megapixel camera rotated ten degrees per shot would produce 180 megapixels of raw stills. And yes, you could do the same with a videocam--just export the footage as still files using any number of video programs, then stitch them together. The scanning method of RoundShot is slow--it might be able to produce a 360 degree perspective from the point of view of a moving observer, but the observer wouldn't travel far.
it rotates with a slit, it's more for pictures of static scenery, than normal snapshots.
Someday we'll all be negroes
It's a single number that peopel can, and so marketers push, as the "good factor" of something. People don't want to actually research products. That is difficult, time consuming, and often leads one to the conclusions that there IS no best, just different tradeoffs. Most people would like things to be as simple as a number they can look at to determine how good something is.
For cameras, it's megapixels. Like everything, there are foundations in truth. A large problem with CCD devices, at least initally, was resolution. 35mm film is equivalant to at least 4000x4000 pixles (16 megapixels) if done well. CCd devices were struggling at less than a million. Worse, CCDs are luma sensitive only (black and white), so you have to do a colour mask on them, reducing the effective resolution you get out of them.
So for a while, pizels were a good measure of the quality you'd get. You could hook great optics to a system, didn't matter, the picture would still suck because the resolution was so slow.
Well, this is all not the case with CCDs any more. It's not at all expensive to build multi-megapixel CCDs, and some companies (Canon) are even using different technology to better capture light. Now it's all about the optics. Any professional photographer or cinematographer will tell you that the lense is critical, for analogue or digital, and you often spend more on it than the camera.
Problem it, it's not easy to attach a number to lenses to determine how good they are. Different ones are good at different things and there isn't an objective rating anyhow. Also, good optics re expensive. You just aren't going to build a stellar lense for $50. Pixel count is cheap, and thus easy to sell. Also good optics are pretty much mutually exclusive with small size, which is in demand.
As you noted, very similar to mhz. Used to be, mhz was a good emasure of PC performance. For one, Intel was the only real game in town, but also there wasn't as much variance in architectures. Plus memory was fast enough to fully support the processor's needs (no multipliers), there were no GPUs, DOS was single user/single task, and so on. More or less, other then waiting for things to load from disk, your bottleneck was the CPU. So if you doubled the mhz, you really did double performance.
Well of course that's just not the case today. However, it's already stuck as the measure. People know mhz, and it's simple. So to many, it is the definitive performance guide.
Unfortunately, not a lot you can do about it. Pepople will take the wasy way out and fail to excersize due dilligence and marketers WILL take advantage of this.
This isn't the first such camera. They call this one a bargain because the PanoScan was around $27,000 for its first model.
Other people have made cameras like this for far less at home. You can make a basic one for $50 in parts. All you need is a single line (or 3 colour line) scanner element as found in most scanners, a camera to put it in with a big lens, and a stepper motor to spin it instead of rolling it along the scanner bed.
You can even spin it by hand if you have something measuring how you turn it to expose each scanline right.
Check out this guy who built one on the cheap.
My favourite application was the guy who took pictures of the moon using a single line scanner. He put the scanner into the eyepiece of a fixed telescope. Then, he had the earth rotate, thus passing the scanner over the surface of the moon to record an image.
The reason he could only do the moon is the scanner elements from hand scanners are not that light sensative. They expect a bright light to light up the object.
Of course, 70 megapixels is nothing. I have been doing giant stitched panoramas much bigger than that for a long time though I don't put them that size on the web.
However the first image of burning man on this page is 210 megapixels. You need to see it printed out, which you can if you come to Burning Man.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
What you're seeing is ALIASING, not Moiré, and it's entirely due to the resizing of the original image for the website - did you really think that small panorama was 70MP? My desktop is 1344x1008 = 1.35MP and the website picture is quite a bit smaller than that.
That was classic intercourse!