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.

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