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.'"

Comments

Re:Wow...

[FrYGuY101]

I fear that to be the next "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of THESE" meme...

Technical Explanation

[CyberBill]

Just to let everyone know, what this little camera is, is a scanner on its side. Instead of moving a linear CCD sensor back and forth, this is just a linear sensor mounted around a servo. Really basic stuff here.

As far as the lens goes, It may be possible that they are not even using one, by using the "pin-hole" technique, but I am not sure this would produce good optics.

If we used the same description of megapixels for scanners, most scanners would be capable of a few tens of megapixels.

-Bill

Re:Technical Explanation

[Animats]

Yeah. It's a 2700 pixel line scanner on a mechanical scanner, and a rather slow one. It takes 20 seconds to do a scan. Sports photography? No way.

I had something like this on my desk twenty years ago. It was the first commercial high-resolution scanning camera, made by Datacopy. Several thousand pixel line scanner, mirror driven by a stepping motor, a really good lens, and a big copy stand. B/W, no greyscale.

Re:Beyond Megapixels?

[Anonymous Coward]

70 megapixels is a very good result, but not exactly spectacular. A normal 36mm camera covers a little more than 50 degrees of horizontal angle of view, which means there are 7 shots to a full circle. If you assume that they also cover twice the vertical angle of view, then this camera has the lens quality demands of a 5 megapixel camera.

Re:So isn't the megapixels rating a farse?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

I think TRUST does this. They sell a 3MP camera, and then mention in small letters: 2MP sensor. See for example:
http://www.pbase.com/cameras/trust/powercam_750 but
http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPC-Trust_PowerCam_750 _L CD_Zoom#fulldesc mentions that it's a 2Mp camera....

Fuji also used to do this. They would have a sensor with diagonal pixel orientation, and that would allow them to interpolate the inbetween pixels. (Think of a checkerboard. The black squares are sensor pixels, the white ones are interpolated.)

Sony (I'm ashamed to say) sold the DSC505V as a 3.3MP camera. It has a 3.3MP sensor, but the lens can only generate an image on 2.6MP of those pixels. So in reality it's a 2.6MP camera. Still, a very good 2.6MP camera :-).

Luckily, most of the others are holding out, and not inflating their specs through software interpolation in the cameras.....

Any cam with remote control capabilities?

[Anonymous Coward]

For me the big letdown with webcams is that they all are pretty much glorified security cameras, esp. with motion detection, and so on. But has their been a camera that lets you rotate, zoom in or out, like a real camera should?

Viking I and II

[wowbagger]

This camera operates in many ways the same as the cameras on Viking I and II - a rotating platform presents a line of pixels to an imaging element - in Viking the system went a bit further in that the line of image data was scanned by a mirror to direct it to one of several photodiodes to image the different parts of the spectrum.

The advantage to a system like this is that number of pixels in the axis scanned by the slit can be increased by finer control over the stepping motors driving it. While at some point you end overscanning scene (each strip covers much of the same ground as the previous strip due to the angle of view of the imaging element) you do gain some information by that overscanning - so you do increase the resolution in that axis.

Now, a camera like this is USELESS for motion photography (so all the one-handed typists drooling over pr0n are S.O.L.) - in fact the Viking camera team created a picture of themselves while they were testing the camera on Earth - one guy got in the shot five times by waiting until he had been scanned, then running around behind the camera, getting into position again, and being scanned again.

HOWEVER, I'd love to have a camera like this for taking pictures of places like The Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, the view from Pike's Peak, and other scenic vistas - there is simply no way to capture these places with anything like a normal camera.

Imagine if a camera like this could be located at the summit of Mt. Everest!

Or better still, Mare Tranquillitatis