"Dream Team" to Create Gigapixel Photo System

neutron_p writes "An eclectic group of artists and scientists that organizers have dubbed the "dream team" of imaging and visualization are gathered at New York University this week to begin to create a photographic system capable of capturing and displaying a gigapixel of visual information in a single image. The first Big Picture Summit, Dec. 8 and 9, is organized by artist-photographer Clifford Ross. Ross says his goal is to bring closer to reality his desire to create a "you are there" photographic experience for those who have not personally witnessed the sublime beauty of natural scenes such as Mt. Sopris in Colorado."

Comments

Red Team Racing

[CrazyJim1]

Last I heard, there were already gigapixel cameras available. The problem is that they're not that affordable. We had one down CMU for the autonomous road race. I didn't do much on the project though and I feel bad about that.

Re:Red Team Racing

[imsabbel]

AFAIK, you are mistaken.
The highest end stuff i know of is in the 100+ Mpixel area, plut those "cheat" (they have 1D sensor lines scanning the image, so forget about anything that could move).

Re:Red Team Racing

[Anonymous Coward]

I flew in to the initial meeting but didn't do a damn thing after that. :-(

Re:Red Team Racing

[Anonymous Coward]

thus allowing scientists to be able to photograph very small complex things.

Like W's sense of compassion, the Democrat's long-term vision, or my genitalia.

Re:Red Team Racing

[jafomatic]

Just when I thought there'd never be a need for (+0 self-deprecating), someone goes and proves me wrong.

Excellent troll/flamebait/funny; I wish I hadn't spent all my mod points yesterday.

Re:Red Team Racing

[mmkkbb]

Wow, you were almost worth listening to.

Re:Red Team Racing

[Anonymous Coward]

religion is a plauge

"plague".

Re:Red Team Racing

[the angry liberal]

Right, but here is what the article says:

this week to begin to create a photographic system capable of capturing and displaying a gigapixel of visual information in a single image.

This would include systems that "cheat". Nothing says it has to cost $20 and fit in your shirt pocket. I think this has been done with spacecraft for several years by taking multiple pictures and lining them up into one extremely high resolution image, technically this accomplishes what the headline makes it sound like they are looking for.

Large Format film cameras

[mrm677]

Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

Even my 4x5 camera yields over 100 megapixels when scanning film with a $300 Epson flatbed.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[grahamsz]

People do seem to loose sight of the "best technology for the job".

We just dont have anything that can capture 3 gigabytes of data in hundredth of a second... doing the equivilent with film is so easy.

However working with 100 mpixel scans in photoshop is way too painful for me... i think i need to get a 4x5 enlarger.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[temojen]

Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

Shhh... that's how they do it (well, that, slow film, and good lenses).

I was just checking the site out yesterday. They have some pretty amazing pictures.

Even my 4x5 camera yields over 100 megapixels when scanning film with a $300 Epson flatbed.

I get about 20MP from scanning prints of pictures taken on my 35mm at 100iso. Pretty good for a camera made in 1980. I just can't get the colour quite right. That's why I'm thinking of getting a negative/slide scanner, which should yeild 15MP, but better colour (16 bit colour for the one I'm looking at).

Re:Large Format film cameras

[ajs]

"Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

There are dozens of reasons to want very high resolution digital imaging. It cuts down on cost, waste, time, storage, and gives you many lighting options that you don't have with film (though film has its own advantages).

The primary reason, though, would simply be that photographers are using digital cameras in many places where they work quite well, and they would like them to eventually be the primary workhorse for most photographic needs.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[gstoddart]

Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

Hold on there fella. This is slashdot. You can't have first post *and* be correct. :-P

But seriously, what kind of pixel resolutions are generated by large format film? (Yes, film isn't pixels, I know). Is 8x10 format about as big as you would realistically use without building a custom camera? I know in the past people have done custom sizes.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Cecil]

Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

That's like saying why bother creating better compression formats when you can already compress a 4 minute sound file to (hypothetical) under a meg at 128kbps quality by encoding it to mp3 128kbps first, then to wma 128kbps. You're doing one lossy conversion, light to film, then a very different type of lossy conversion, scanning film to digital. Sure, it works pretty well in practice, but it's far from optimal.

And many photographers obsess over making things optimal. It's why they buy $3,000+ lenses. And not just one, either.

Anyway, the answer for "why" seems pretty obvious to me, at least.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

But using film is more akin to having billions of tiny cameras all writing to seperate storage systems in parallel.

Perhaps that might be a way forward..some form of linked storage system similar perhaps to RAID.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[MHobbit]

I agree.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[vought]

I've got mod points, but I'm going to contribute to this thread instead of modding. There's a lot of assumption about image quality based on numbers alone, and fortunately I worked and taught in a terrific digital studio for the past two years, so I want to set striaght a couple of things.

4X5 inch film comprises an imageable area of about 19 square inches with a lens that covers this film adquately.

19 square inches of high-resolution color film - Fuji Provia or Velvia (limiting myself to color for the sake of this discussion) will capture about 2400 dpi worth of useful image data at 8 bpp. The film can easily be scanned to higher resolutions and higher bit depths, but the main reason to do this on a high-end drum scanner is to avoid having to use software to interpolate the image for extremely large prints that exceed the resolution of the original scan.

19 square inches * 2400dpi * 8bpp = just under 300MB.

That's about 100 megapixels, give or take a few percentage points. Cost of film and developing per shot is about $3.50 for color, about $.80 for black and white.

Scanning a 4X5 inch sheet of film costs about $80.00 at my favorite lab. (I use westcoastimaging.com, even though I'm down the street from Calypso Imaging in Santa Clara. WCI does an incredible job, and nearly everyone on staff is actually a photographer, or married to one.)

Add $20.00 for FedEx back and forth from the lab, and you've got a 100 megapixel image with some slight imperfections (dust spots, chromatic aberration from some older lenses) for about $105.00 per exposure. At this point, the fun begins; the photographer can use Photoshop or the GIMP to make tonal and contrast changes, attempt to match the chrome, or get really fanciful.

You could make a 16-bit scan of a photograph that contains super-subtle tonal gradation to ensure against banding in the final print, but since most digital photographic printers like the LightJet and Chromira only print 8-bit files, it's usually a moot point.

Normally, lower-end scanners have to scan in 16-bit to eliminate noise and increase quality to a point where they can stand close to an 8-bit drum scan from a Tango.

Without explaining the vagaries of scanning backs, it is possible to directly capture a 100MP image from a conventional 4X5 inch camera - but only if the subject isn't moving. Even the 40-year old shutter in my Schneider 90mm lens can work at 1/500 sec, given sufficient light for the film I have loaded. No "gagapixel" camera can do this yet - not even remotely.

This whole "gigapixel" push is a scam. After making some 30X40 test prints from the Canon EOS1-D mkII the other day, I can say without question that digital cameras are pushing the boundries of medium format film while remaining under the 30 megapixel benchmark.

The proof is in the print. In a world where most digital images are posted and viewed on web pages, no one will easily tell the difference between a 30k JPEG that started life as a high-resolution scan and one that started life in a .06MP Apple QuickTake from 1996. A print on paper at a equivalent resolution is the best wayo to test real image quality.

In this case, megapixel comparisons are moot. Because the characteristics of film and digital are different, you can't accurately compare a scan from film and a digital file of the same size on screen alone.

The most accurate way to determine the quality of an image is to look at a print. When they reach 30-40 megapixels, with forgettable battery life and no crashes, I may be tempted to give up my view camera for a DSLR, but some features still won't be there (full tilt/swing/shift movements, for one).

For me, 20 pounds of view camera equipment (using exactly one battery, for my spot meter) is still (and may reamin for several years) the easiest way to capture high-resolution photographs in the field. That's what I like to do with my camera - if my goal was to get quick turnaround studio shots, then I'

Re:Large Format film cameras

[gstoddart]

Large-format cameras still make "high megapixel" images more quickly, easily, and cheaply than the interesting but ultimately misguided project cited in the article.

Cool. Thanks for all the info. Sometimes I find it difficult to compare the apples and monkeys that get thrown around here. :-P

Cheers

Re:Large Format film cameras

[mrm677]

Great post! Have you considered scanning your 4x5 transparencies with an Epson 4870? That is what I am eying up...

Re:Large Format film cameras

[vought]

No. the best way to scan 4X5 transparencies and negatives is still the Tango.

Flatbeds can't approach the micron-tolerance focus and dimensional stability of Kami-mounted drum scans. Oil-mounted scans can have a detrimental effect on film over time.

You can liquid mount to a flatbed for extra flatness, if you've got optically clear mylar, some 3M mounting tape and some Kami fluid laying around. (At $13.00 an 11X14 sheet...) Just make sure to do all this with the scanner unplugged, as Kami is highly flammable.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[e2d2]

One reason I think would be the better CCD that could be used in video equipment also. I know that movie film equals exist but they certainly aren't as easy to use as say a film camera.

Some photographers have moved to digital simply because of the cost, film is expensive and one can shoot as many pictures as they like using digital without fear of waste.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[gotpaint32]

Large format film sounds nice but u run into problems like increased chromatic abberation (bigger lens), processing defects, and of course analog to digital conversion losses.

What annoys me is that most people believe a film camera is nothing like digital cameras. Yes, digital cameras have no "film" but really, what do u think film is, that makes it so magical. There are grains on the film as well as grains on the photographic paper responsible for capturing incoming light just as a ccd or cmos sensor would on any digital camera. True you can spring for ultra high resolution film which will have active grain clusters (not all grains in a film are guaranteed to function, as chemistry is a bit of a sloppy science) slightly smaller than a gigapixel camera, but then u lose pretty much all the benefit in the analog to digital transfer just as a transfer to photopaper will degrade the quality as well.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[prichardson]

Sure, it works pretty well in practice, but it's far from optimal.

It's a real shame that it only works in practice. Because working in practice doesn't matter at all it has to work in theory. (Incidentally, this actually does work in theory, too.)

Also, your analogy is seriously flawed. It's much more like taking a record (a record with few flaws that runs at a very low speed) and encoding that to an audio format somewhere in the neighborhood of twice the quality of a CD.

The record player you do this with is like the camera. The equipment that originally recorded the record on is like your camera. The microphone is like the lens.

This is also in a world where recording straight to digital doesn't sample fast enough.


As an aside, the reason that digital pictures are harder is that sound happens over a very very long period of time compared to photography. You've probably noticed that most digital cameras absolutely suck at taking action shots in all but the brightest light. This is because the stuff that detects light in the camera doesn't work as fast as the chemicals on the film and doesn't scale as well. The reason that scanning works is that a scanner has an eternity to deal with the image compared to the instant that a camera has.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, and then with their very expensive finely ground lens they purposely take the shot out of focus so that you know it's Art.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[LWATCDR]

Kind of hard to do it remotely. With an 802.11b or you can send the pictures miles. Ideal for say remote images from a telescope or Mount Saint Helen.
Besides distance you have time limitations if you want the image right now. You have to develop and scan the image. Kind of related to the that remote issue as well I mean you can always go and grab the image later.
Costs are is also an issue. I head some one say the cost of the picture plus scanning was around $100.
The cost for storage of of digital images are much lower than the development+scanning+film images.
I can get a 300 GB hard drive for $190. figure that you get 250GB after formating you can store roughly raw 1800 images on that one drive. If you use tiff format with LZW or a png you will get about twice that many. I picked those formats since they use a lossless compression system. Your storage cost for the raw images not counting power and the actual computer come to five to ten cents.
For archiving using DVD-Rs it comes down to less than one cent an image.

Film has it's advantages but so does digital.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Aidtopia]

I'm a little confused by some of the aritmetic. It looks like you multipled 19 square inches by a linear 2400 dpi.

Also, according to the New York Times piece on this guy, this first prototype is a very large format negative film camera, and the image is scanned from the negative on a drum scanner.

Aside from that, I think people spend too much time worrying about resolution and not enough about bit depth. I forget the exact numbers, but B&W negative film has a contrast range of 10 or 11 orders of magnitude. A B&W print is less. Color slides less, and color prints even less. But even a color print exceeds 24bpp (8 bits x RGB). Personally, I'd much rather look at projected slides than print.

I heard a talk by a visual effects guy from ILM who explained that when they have to composite live action from film with CGI (computer-generated imagery), the first thing they have to do is compress the contrast and color range to match the range of the CGI. If there are a lot of effects in the movie, they'll end up compressing the contrast for the entire film.

Another friend of mine who recently left ILM wouldn't tell me the actual resolution they use for visual effects (trade secret), but he implied it's much lower than you'd expect.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[phoenix321]

Photographers using traditional film have argued exactly the same for almost five years now and digital photography took off anyway.

Digital technology becomes cheaper every month, no matter what piece of equipment we're talking about - except digicams just before xmas of course - so at one point we might have gigapixel cameras in the consumer price range, who knows.

I must apologize for washing your detailed and insightful post away, but I think you have a narrow viewpoint from an elitist photographer's perspective. An incredibly old-school one at that, sorry to be so blunt. Analog cameras have intrinsic drawbacks that cannot be overcome and which are the reason for the digicam craze. I agree to you that digital photography is not the most efficient and not the cheapest way to do hoch resolution imaging at the moment. But Moore's Law will ensure it is in the future.

Advantages of a high-resolution digital imaging system, from an outsider's viewpoint not married to celluloid and chemicals:

- digital images can be previewed extremely fast. If a shot was wrong, retry without waste.
- digital images can be sent via networks around the globe extremely fast. Newscasts, distributed expert teams, peer review, you name it.
- digital images can be ported to any viewing equipment, instantly. Cinema-like projection equipment, large scale video walls, large printers, details on small handouts and laptop screens
- archival without color degradation
- catalogues are generated in an instant
- easy whitebalance, even after the shooting
- automatic recording of timestamps and used equipment, shutter times etc.

Sorry for bringing up the "dinosaur"-argument, but sooner or later analog photography will die and there's nothing you can do about it. For consumer cameras, analog's nearly dead and photo studios are following now, leading digital photos slowly but steadily up the quality/picture size ladder. You are not alone, as there are many audiophile vinyl and radio tube enthusiasts out there, that simply refuse to acknowlegde digital technology and its advantages.

To mimic your "sum up":

-Large-format cameras may be easier and cheaper, but prone to human error, slower and horribly unflexible in image presentation.
-A print may be the best way to judge image quality, but in case of a 10x10m image, it can take you days if not weeks to get it on paper.

A projected or backlighted image certainly is a thousand times more enticing and "real" to the viewer's eyes. Paper images are lacking vivid colors and real appearance in my opinion and there's no studio light full-spectrum or bright enough to concinve me otherwise. A paper photograph may induce different emotions or a more distand point of view, that's why black&white imaging is so intense - but paper is no accurate representation of reality and it's going the way of portrait oil painting soon, I think. More artsy, less real. Real viewing is luminous, paper is not.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[phoenix321]

Damn right. Analog photography is retreating like oil paintings were a century ago. First they strive eons to get as real as possible, doing quite photorealistic paintings with great skill by hand and then, the instant a better, faster and cheaper technology is on the horizon, they switch instantly to "art". They knew they coulnd't compete with photography in terms of realism, so they added emotion and un-realism to their paintings. Their art died anyway.

Today it's pretty much similar and as soon as photographic quality became abundant (in a technical sense) they switched back some gears and declared that "emotional art". Took out the colors and shot in black and white again, washed out the sharpness, blurred the lens, jumped through hundreds of hoops and it didn't improve the art, it just added style.

It seems to me there's a regular pattern to it: if you're losing ground on one branch, if your product or profession is dying - add emotion and declare it art or lifestyle. Consumer products are marketed pretty much the same way once every other advantage is lost against the competition.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

The proof is in the print. In a world where most digital images are posted and viewed on web pages, no one will easily tell the difference between a 30k JPEG that started life as ...

Well, there you go.

This isn't for "most digital images". New technologies that push the boundaries of what can be done aren't for normal uses. (Duh.)

They aren't doing this to make disposable gigapixel cameras to put in grocery store check-out lines.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this isn't a digital camera. I read about this on news.com.com.com.com earlier today and saw how he was taking pictures using a custom camera with parts gathered together from a camera from the ~1920's and a microscope. The article mentioned how he was producing 9inch by 18inch negatives. Then when scanning the negative into a computer, he got 100's of times more resolution than todays high end digital cameras. Here's a link to the article I read which clears up a lot (but not all) of the details.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[spitefulcrow]

"Consumer products are marketed pretty much the same way once every other advantage is lost against the competition."
...like iMacs?

Re:Large Format film cameras

[boots@work]

Great post, thankyou. You make we want to go out and work on my (humble) nature photography.

If I liked to geek out instead of making pictures of the rapidly degrading and disappearing wildlands of the United States, I'd probably be all for this ridiculous gigapixel project.

Right, but beautiful pictures are offtopic for Slashdot. None of the artists doing beautiful work get mentioned here.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[forkazoo]

2400 dots per square inch? Umm, I think you may need to clarify the math real quick...

4x5 inches, at 2400 dots per inch is 9600*12,000 pixels
That's about 115 million pixels. 8 bits per channel, three channel RGB gets us about 345 MB.

The OP's math is oddly phrazed, and it made me do a double take, but it checks out.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Johnathon_Dough]

The primary reason, though, would simply be that photographers are using digital cameras in many places where they work quite well, and they would like them to eventually be the primary workhorse for most photographic needs.

I spend all day retouching photo's from these photographers. At this point I am of two minds over this. On one hand I like the fact that digital photos end up needing more work done to them than from a transparency. (People really miss film grain, and the colors are always not what the photographer expects). Every 6-8 months we start getting larger files, but not any better quality wise.

On the other hand, since digital photography has gotten so wide spread I am seeing much more "bad" photography. The lighting sucks and you can tell the ad agency went with some cut rate photgrapher who doesn't understand the concept of an F stop. While this also means more work for me, it is really frustrating to fix the same damn thing again and again because the photographer doesn't understand the concept of his chosen profession. But hey, he can take 500 shots to get that one image his client actually likes.

bah

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Johnathon_Dough]

I'm a little confused by some of the aritmetic. It looks like you multipled 19 square inches by a linear 2400 dpi.

He was referring to two seperate things. The area is only relevant in that it gives you an indication of what the file size will be. dpi or ppi (same thing dots or pixels, dot's is a carry over from screen printing) is the indicator of how much information is in a particular amount of space, and his 19 square inches is an attempt to give an idea of area, so the total number of pixels is 2400 (dpi hz) x 2400 (dpi vrt) = 5760000 pixels per square inch. Which is a useless number, because you now need to multiply that number by 19, and now you have the somewhat useless fact that there is 109440000 pixels in a 4x5 transparency, whoops, forgot to multiply that number by 3 (Red Green Blue channels), 328320000.

Anyways, all of that is rediculously cumbersome, so, we have the tendancy to report the size, ppi, and color depth (RGB, CMYK, LaB) which let's you know after some time in the industry, aproximately how big a file will be in megabytes.

Aside from that, I think people spend too much time worrying about resolution and not enough about bit depth.

Mostly that is because most people who are dealing with this stuff are outputting to print. Followed by movies. Followed by (a ditant third) photographers (think art not commercial). And they are mostly concerned with reproducing the color spaces that they deal with.

Here is a color space chart that shows the box within a box within a box that is human created color in relation to visible light.

Personally, I'd much rather look at projected slides than print.

Me too, but it is a pain in the ass to distrubute the slide projectors to all those house wives with their copies of Vanity Faire.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[ajs]

"since digital photography has gotten so wide spread I am seeing much more "bad" photography"

I understand your frustration.

Film was hard to work with, and only people who knew what they were doing could extract useful results from it.

Then some wingnut that thought he could play God introduced the concept of advancing film. Oh, that was a sad day. All of a sudden you had moron after moron taking shot after shot with no regard for the fundamentals.

Then ... auto focus. The phrase is blasphemy and ushered in a wave of blasphemers who weren't even smart enough to understand what it was they were desecrating.

And today we have digital photography.

Is the digital camera a useful, powerful tool with unique properties which are, for the most part, as yet untapped? Sure it is. So was the 35mm camera.

Will it, through ease of use, introduce throngs of idiots into the industry? Of course. Same thing happened in computer science, but there we still get our share of brilliant, insightful professionals and the same will be true of photography.

Don't hate the tool for being easy to use. Digital photography has a great deal of promise, and there are plenty of gifted photographers using such cameras... yes, there are real artists using the medium, and they don't need Photoshop to take your breath away or make you really think about their subjects. Give them a gigapixel camera and I'm sure they'll astound us.

Meanwhile, I just want a CCD with enough real eastate that I can not only really piss off, but actually cause a purist to break down in tears by saving to JPEG ;-)

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Fallen_Knight]

Thats exactly why i got a dSLR. i dont' have to worry about cost of film or wasting a shot. Allows for much more experimentation

But i do plan on getting a 35m, and a large format camera once i get better at photography.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[rssrss]

I forget the exact numbers, but B&W negative film has a contrast range of 10 or 11 orders of magnitude. . . But even a color print exceeds 24bpp (8 bits x RGB).

Typically the term orders of magnitude refers to powers of ten. I think that the quoted statement meant to refer to powers of two. Photographers usually use terms such as "stops" or "exposure values." E.G. one stop is a factor of two change in the amount of light.

In a given scene, the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene will determine the range of tones perceived. Perception varies logarithmicaly. A doubling in the amount of light is percieved as a one step change in brightness. Take a picture printed on white paper. The white backround may reflect 98% of the incident light. Dull black ink on that paper might not reflect more than 2% of the incident light. It won't be much less, you can try this at home with a good photo meter. I once tried sooting up a piece of glass. IIRC, that came out around 2% in bright sunlight.

On a printed picture, whether by photographic or mechanical means, therefor the practical limit of tonal gradation is less than a factor of 64 or 2^8 or 8 stops.

Since color pictures are three monochromes printed in separate colors (hush about cymk) 3 x 8 or 24 bits will specify tonal gradation adequately for color prints, unless you feel that you need more half steps in your system. (in a 24 bit system the step between 0 and 1 is enormous a 50% reduction in the amount of light, art directors may want half or quarter steps in there).

Color film and prints cannot have a greater tonal range than monochrome for this reason. Indeed, because of the layering process by which they are made it will always be less.

Because transmitted light is stronger than reflected light. (Do not look at the sun!) And because the human eye can readjust between differently illuminated parts of a scene, slides and movies can use more tonal range than printed material. This is a very limited virtue. The tendency of cinematographers to put most of the scene in shadow (that is to concentrate the tonal range of the scene 3 to 5 stops below the brightest parts, instead of centering them around the 2.5 stop neutral gray) for the past 20 years is just plain annoying.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[mennucc1]

> archival without color degradation
that is, assuming that the medium on which you archive your digital pictures is everlasting - but this is probably not the case.
The 30 years old slides that I find in my home are still reasonably good looking - yes, they do show some colour degradation, but they are basilarly OK. Do you trust your CDROMs as well? Well, you should not : plenty of sources are reporting that the expected lifetime of your home-burnt CDROMs may be much less. When your CDROMs will be too worn out to be readable, my color slides will be still there for my nephews to view.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[mrm677]

Photographers using traditional film have argued exactly the same for almost five years now and digital photography took off anyway.

Yes, digital has mostly replaced 35mm (for color anyways) and is encroaching on medium format. However I am skeptical that Moore's law applies to CCD and CMOS photo sensors. The low-hanging fruit has been grabbed and the higher megapixel sensors, coming to the prosumer market today, are quite noisy in order to get 7 or 8 megapixels. Plus I think you will see a point when sub $1000 cameras simply start to level off on megapixels, because they aren't needed at a point.

A digital sensor that can do with 4x5 film does is a long ways off. Plus you are ignoring the aspects of a view camera, such as tilts/swings/rise/etc, that cannot be reproduced in photoshop.

But I really don't care what happens am an not clinging to old technology. My 40-year old view camera lenses will be usable with that new digital 4x5 sensor invented 20 years from now anyways. I am a hobbyist and I use what I enjoy. If my living was photography, I might feel differently about digital.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[grahamsz]

I'd skip the 35mm - i haven't run a single roll of film since i bought my dSLR a couple of months ago.

Large format is a far better place to invest your money :)

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

((8in*2400ppi)*(10in*2400ppi))/1,000,000=460Mpixel
Signeficantly lower than a Gp and the best films are better to no more than 2400dpi.

However fortunetaly the 8x10 isn't the largest photographic film! Huza! enter the 32in x 24in! Towing in an amazing 4GigaPixels with a file size of around 76,800x57,600. To deal with these you're probably going to want an SGI with UMA so that you can deal with the 12GB images.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Johnathon_Dough]

Don't hate the tool for being easy to use. Digital photography has a great deal of promise, and there are plenty of gifted photographers using such cameras... Give them a gigapixel camera and I'm sure they'll astound us.

I agree, unfortunately, I have also seen a decline in the quality of photography from people we have worked with before in film. I give these peole more benefit of the doubt as, I know they can produce better work, I am just assuming that they are new to the digital medium. Still frustrating though.

Meanwhile, I just want a CCD with enough real eastate that I can not only really piss off, but actually cause a purist to break down in tears by saving to JPEG ;-)

well, JPEG doesn't scare me. As long as it is only used once. After much testing, you can't see the difference in print of a high resolution eps file and a high resolution jpg (med. high and up quality). The problem comes from people that open their jpeg, work the file, then save it as a jpeg again. Changes how the file is compressed, and looks like poo poo(technical term).

Re:Large Format film cameras

[ajs]

Oh, you can see the difference between JPEG and non-JPEG alright, you're probably just looking at a bad example that masks the differences.

The problems with JPEG are legion (though it's an amazingly cool format for preserving the sense of the image without nearly as much storage).

For starters, JPEG drops a LOT of color information, which will usually result in images where subject matter that has very sharp color contrast (but not intensity) will be washed out. For example, take a picture of a jar of multi-flavor jelly beans. You'll find the differences are stark.

As far as re-saving, this is solvable, but only by someone who knows what they're doing. You need to be very careful about how much you change the colors in the image (because they'll be re-truncated on saving), and you MUST NOT change the upper-left origin (e.g. by cropping) or change the scale of the image. Actually, that's a bit of a lie, but correctly cropping or scaling JPEG images is tricky. You need to do so only in units of 64x64 pixels, as measured from the origin, and scaling is still going to cost you some quality (though not as much if you go up or down in units which are powers of 2). This is because JPEG images compress each region of 64x64 seperately, and loss artifacts will conform to those dimensions (this is why JPEG artifacts look blocky). If you crop to a non 64x64 boundary and re-save, you're introducing a conflicting set of artifacts and you lose a huge amount of quality.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Johnathon_Dough]

For starters, JPEG drops a LOT of color information, which will usually result in images where subject matter that has very sharp color contrast (but not intensity) will be washed out.

True for an RGB image, but, we have done tons of testing on this within the CMYK space (clipped way down from RGB) and the difference is not noticeable across a wide range of images when proofed. You see a slight difference in color information when reading the numbers in the RGB, usually less than 1% though, and in CMYK there is no difference in color or luminosity values. Now, all of this is assuming that you are using the highest quality lowest compression jpeg.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[Fallen_Knight]

hmm i want to learn 35mm before i start playing with largeformat:P i think i'm to used to dSLRs right now lol ANd a good canon film cam is only couple 100, and my dSLR is canon is ic an use all my lenses with both;)

What do you recomend in terms for a large format camera?

Re:Large Format film cameras

[phoenix321]

...and shoes, especially sneakers/running shoes and clothing. The real question, albeit flame war starting, should rather be: is this a phenomenon typical for male-dominated product categories? Computers, costly sports equipment, automobiles, bikes, electronic gadgets - male dominated consumer group I'd say.

Store clerks from these product categories tend to be overly aggressive, unfriendly, low-level, expert elitist and so on, so these could really be true gender specific marketing effects, who knows...

Re:Large Format film cameras

[phoenix321]

CD-ROMs last only a fraction of the advertised time, right. But technology advances quick enough to not needing them around 30 years from now.

Your slides cannot be copied or viewed now without serious loss of quality compared to the original image. That's why the seventies look so "funny colored" when viewing images from back then. Digital images will be the same forever, can be multiplied and copied in an instant and I bet my keyboard we'll still be having jpeg-compatible viewing equipment even 20-30 years from now. There's a billion of photographs out there in that format and that will drive the industry for as long as it's necessary.

In short: your slides wear out slowly every day. My CD-ROMs wear out slowly every day.

My CD-ROMs have ECC error correction. digital 1, slides 0
My CDs can be backed up easily. digital 2, slides 0
My CDs hold 550 images in 10g acrylic plastic. digital 3, slides 0
My CDs can be transferred in a speed of 15 images per *second* onto the current up-to-date data archival medium, DVD-/+R. DVDs are supposed to outlast CDRs by orders of magnitude, because the data layer is embedded within plastic. digital 4, slides still 0
One DVD can hold 4200 of my images. That's more than a decade worth of hobbyist photography to me. Other's mileage may vary, but DVD-Rs are 50 cent a piece. digital 6, slides 0
Some keep photos on their harddiscs. I do. Linux software raid-5 secured harddrives, to be exact. Only a household fire threatens my photos now. digital 6.5, slides 0
Ten years from now there will be a digital medium, that will hold all photos my family, my friends, girlfriend(s), wife(s), employer(s) can ever produce. On one disk. At less than ten dollar apiece. Slides have no chance against that.

Re:Large Format film cameras

[grahamsz]

I just feel that i haven't touched my film slrs since i got my digital rebel. Although i see your point that they are a cheap investment, particularly if you've already got the lenses.

Learn about fstops and exposure with your digital, it's liberating to be able to see instantaneous results. Has made me a lot better about how and when to use exposure compensation.

I bought a Shen Hao 4x5 from Badger Graphic a couple of years ago and i'm very pleased with it - although i still don't use it as much as i'd like.

I'd recommend looking at that camera since it seems very well made and relatively inexpensive.

Why artists?

[Realistic_Dragon]

Sounds like a technical question to me and the last thing you want when solving technical problems is an artist saying 'well yes, that's all very nice, but we think it should be pink'.

Re:Why artists?

[colmore]

your comment and your sig are a funny combination

Re:Why artists?

[Realistic_Dragon]

Today's Dilbert seems somehow appropriate:

Would you stop if I pointed out that everyone in the room except you is an electrical engineer?

Re:Why artists?

[BWJones]

This is very much like a conversation I just had in another discussion group. The issue is that you have certain optical properties of your eye. Namely starting with the density of photoreceptors which are about 10^5 per square mm. You then have to deal with an imaging surface (the retina) at 2.5 cm from the lens revealing an object of 1mm at 25 cm which gets projected to a size of about 0.1mm onto the back of the retina. If one assumes approximately 320 photoreceptors/mm (averaged over the eye), given a perfect lens the ideal resolution would be about 30 pixels/mm at 25cm away from your eye! which gives you an approximate optimal resolution distinguishability of 10 microns (important for tying flies). Given that most folks do not have perfect lenses, we are really looking at about a 4 micron resolution that can be distinguished monochromatically. So, if one backs away from the object in question resolution becomes much less important for overall perception and the huge Apple Cinema display three feet in front of me right now does a pretty good job at rendering a close approximation of reality at 100dpi. In fact, an 8MP image from my Canon camera on the Cinema Display is almost indistinguishable from a picture of the valley below taken from my office window.

Re:Why artists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's a great idea. However, since the conference was ORGANIZED by an artist, wouldn't it be just a tad presumptuous to ditch him and start on your own?

And anyway, this is a natural photographer, probably an artist like Ansel Adams, an artist who "really understands what he's looking at" (to quote Feynman). It's not some hippie "concept"-artist welding shopping carts together (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Re:Why artists?

[gstoddart]

Sounds like a technical question to me and the last thing you want when solving technical problems is an artist saying 'well yes, that's all very nice, but we think it should be pink'.

No no no. You're confusing marketing with artists.

Artists recognize there needs to be a practical way to make it pink, and can actually listen when you say "God, imagine trying to use a 10-foot wide brush".

The artists want it pink for a reason and are willing to discuss how to make it go.

All marketing knows is that a customer once said pink would be optimal; and they're purely basing it off that fact.

And, the good thing about the artist, once they realize it isn't pink, they don't keep distributing glossies to the customer saying it's pink.

Re:Why artists?

[retinaburn]

Oh yes people indoctrinated with the mythos of their profession are guarenteed to be the only people with valuable insights.

Re:Why artists?

[stereo_Barryo]

And anyway, this is a natural photographer, probably an artist like Ansel Adams, an artist who "really understands what he's looking at" (to quote Feynman). on his site he points to a blowup of the picture and refers to the red bird. It is, however, as every casual naturalist knows, a red-winged blackbird. So much for "really understands what he's looking at".

Re:Why artists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Point taken (I'll assume that you're not lying - a casual inspection of his site didn't turn up what you're referring to.). Your criticism does have a little bit of comic-book-guy-ish nitpicking to it, though. I don't find it inconceivable that one can be an amazing nature photographer and not know the common names of certain fauna. (shrug)

And he did, apparently, build his own camera without prior technical experience. Isn't this respectable, even if it is an unusual goal and method? (shrug) I guess that I just don't understand the idea that having an artist around makes a project worse or harder automatically.

Re:Why artists?

[stereo_Barryo]

Sorry, my inability to post well made the comment more lame than funny as I had enclosed my note in HTML brackets "wise guy" and "slash wise guy" which were stripped out. Actually, I think a technically competent artist is a rare and valuable person who can make great contributions. You can go to the mislabelled bird picture by going to his site, clicking on "R1 project", then "image detail" and then the red box on the right side.

Re:Why artists?

[bubba451]

I know you're (mostly) joking, but I'll bite anyway.

I work for a company that employs almost equal amounts of technical folks and artists, and the simplest way to answer your question is that artists don't take "No" for an answer.

It's all too easy for technical types to find reasons why something can't be done (but CCDs aren't good at capturing pink! but pink doesn't compress well! but the human eye is too sensitive to pink! -- I'm obviously making these up). Artists are great at ignoring your excuses and pushing you anyway.

Sometimes you're right, and it really can't be done. But all to often what you thought was impossible is possible. You just had to think about a different way.

And besides, the artist can then demonstrate your technology in a really cool way that you would have never imagined.

Re:Why artists?

[dustman]

Play with the numbers all you want. Then, go print a document at 100 dpi vs 600 or 1200 dpi, and tell me they look the same.

If they do, go make an appointment with your eye doctor.

Re:Why artists?

[BWJones]

Play with the numbers all you want. Then, go print a document at 100 dpi vs 600 or 1200 dpi, and tell me they look the same.

Did you actually read what I wrote? Read it again and think about it and you might find that what you are currently thinking is supported by my statement.

If they do, go make an appointment with your eye doctor.

Ummmmm. That would be me. :-)

Re:Why artists?

[dustman]

Perhaps it was just a parsing error...

The huge Apple Cinema display three feet in front of me right now does a pretty good job at rendering a close approximation of reality at 100dpi.

I read this as "the Apple Cinema display, which displays at 100 dpi, and is 3 feet from my eye, is indistinguishable from reality" (that last part from your following statement)... perhaps you meant, "is pretty good, considering the fact that it's only 100dpi".

And, whether you are an eye doctor or no, at 3 feet from my face I can easily tell the difference between 100dpi and 600dpi printer output.

I know about the contrast on LCDs isn't super hot, (so it won't be "indistinguishable" from paper, no matter the resolution), but the laptop I'm typing on right now is 96dpi, a bit less than arm's length away, and I can see the pixelation in my text.

Ok..

[ReeprFlame]

It's a great advance, but traditional users will never really need that much. unless they do panoramic shots. The only way something like this would be used is possibly in government tracking satellites for super picture quality...

Re:Ok..

[chemguru]

It's a great advance, but traditional users will never really need that much. unless they do panoramic shots. The only way something like this would be used is possibly in government tracking satellites for super picture quality...

Yes... And we'll never need more than 640k either.

Sheesh.

It's been done, albeit with some manual steps

[seanscottrogers]

Check out the grand canyon in gigapixel glory

Re:It's been done, albeit with some manual steps

[bleckywelcky]

Wow, I never realized the Grand Canyon looked so much like the Bryce Canyon in Utah. It's simply amazing what you can do with a gigapixel image nowadays.

Re:It's been done, albeit with some manual steps

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Actually, he's technically right. Not many people know that the photo of Bryce Canyon in Utah was taken by a photographer standing at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Now, you can really get a sense for just how much resolution that camera is capable of. Plus, it compensates for the curvature of the Earth.

Re:It's been done, albeit with some manual steps

[scaaven]

site is starting to get /.'ed

Re:It's been done, albeit with some manual steps

[PlazMan]

Er, that's Bryce Canyon

Re:It's been done, albeit with some manual steps

[LiquidCoooled]

My god man, are you blind.

If you look really carefully, you can *clearly* see that the image is infact zoomed into the metal pole from the top of the flag left on the moon and again from the window of a house behind Bryce canyon.

Enough resolution, not enough depth

[Anonymous Coward]

The human eye can only resolve the equivalent of a couple megapixels, so the lack of "you are there" is not really a fault of image resolution. It's the lack of real depth that is missing from fotos. Stereo photography is a step forward, but it doesn't allow for natural focus changes and good (high res) stereo vision systems are far too expensive.

Re:Enough resolution, not enough depth

[eln]

Yah, but the higher the resolution of the image, the bigger you can blow it up without losing (human perceptible) image quality. This is the real advantage of super hi-res imagery.

Re:Enough resolution, not enough depth

[DocMax]

I find that when playing FPS games I can get away with a much lower screen resolution if the game has good sound. The "you are there" effect suffers less from a lack of pixels than it does a lack of sounds, smells, temperature...

Re:Enough resolution, not enough depth

[karnal]

Man, I can't imagine what the "smell" would be like after bunny-hopping for 10 minutes straight, dodging rockets like they're going out of style....

Re:Enough resolution, not enough depth

[DocMax]

I may have been thinking of Colorado rather than bunny-hopping when I mentioned smells.

Perhaps the Japanese can help with this one (the smell of Colorado still, not the smell of bunny-hopping).

Re:Enough resolution, not enough depth

[boots@work]

I've been to Colorado. It smells like cowshit, at least if you're within 20 miles of the massive feedlots.

:Ok..++

[ReeprFlame]

Plus the only way you can get "you are there" images, is if we developed some kind of 3-d system. That is what we need more. Think about how cool that would be to truly remember a moment...

Something like these?

[TroZ]

How About a Gigapixel Digital Camera? http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/1 0/1356212&tid=160
Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/02/202720 7&tid=152
Gigapxl Project http://www.gigapxl.org/project.htm

Astronomy

[Big Yak]

Other than recreational uses, what else could this be used for? Telescope cameras pop to mind for space imagery capture. I think current systems use very high-resolution cameras, though anything that drives down prices would drive up quality.

Has someone applied Moore's law to digital camera pixel amount?

Re:Astronomy

[glassesmonkey]

Moore's law may not apply.

See visible light (which is I'm assuming what you plan to take pictures of) have a fixed frequency and wavelength. An image sensor (let's say CMOS, since CCD seems it will be overtaken) is a basically photo-diode.

So you have some diode region on your chip that is being hit with photons. They penetrate the surface a certain distance down vertically, depending on their energy (IR, blue, red, etc.). One factor is that as the geometries shrink, the electrons are generated some fixed depth down vertically in the silicon and then have to be collected in one pixel, and not the neighboring pixels. Think of bubbles rising up to the top of a fish tank and you are trying to make smaller and smaller collection grid on the surface to determine where each one originated.

The second factor is the same that effects lithography, the pixels (photodiodes) can't be smaller than some percentage of a wavelength of the light. So you are fixed at some point on a minium pixel size depending on what color light.

Re:Astronomy

[jridley]

If you're talking about lots and lots of megapixels per exposure, that's pointless for astronomy. There are fixed physical limitations in play. Film and CCDs in the 6 to 10 megapixel range are already imaging all the detail that you can capture in a managable sized aperture. There just isn't detail smaller than that, both because of dawe's limit on arcseconds of detail available per inch of aperture, but also because of atmospheric interference.

If you're talking about creating very large images from mosaics, sure. It's been done, lots, for decades.

As far as creating a super-large image that is explorable, there's a lot better way, and it's been done. In the sky, there's a lot of starfields with neat objects embedded in them occasionally. This means you can mathematically generate the starfields from star positions, and insert scaled images of the neat objects as the explorer moves his view window over them.

To see this in action, pick up a copy of Starry Night. It's a very fun program to just cruise around the sky with.

3D

[alan_dershowitz]

I have personally found even lower-resolution 3D pictures to look much nicer than high-res 2D pictures. Combine something like this with stereoscopic glasses and it would be like "being there". I wonder if Mr. Ross has considered this.

Re:3D

[whereiswaldo]

Yes, I believe this is the real key to more realistic images. Giving people a dead easy and convenient way to view the images is probably what's holding the idea back.

Air Flow

[mattkime]

Ross says his goal is to bring closer to reality his desire to create a "you are there" photographic experience for those who have not personally witnessed the sublime beauty of natural scenes such as Mt. Sopris in Colorado."

I hope he doesn't forget the gentle breeze. A small fan should work nicely.

Another Gigapixel camera

[saccade.com]

Check out Gigapxl.org. The guy creating the cameras for this project is a serious optical genious.

Re:Another Gigapixel camera

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out this comment. The guy writing it must be a serious spelling genius.

Re:Another Gigapixel camera

[chmilar]

Yes. This project is superior to the so-called "Dream Team".

The Gigapxl team have taken a far more scientific and rigorous approach than Ross.

For example, they have:

• designed their own custom lens to meet their resolution requirements.
• measured the exact performance of their film.
• accounted for atmospheric limitations to light propagation.
• ensured the exact alignment of the lens and film.
• used laser rangefinders to set accurate focus.

Both Gigapxl and Ross are using converted 9x18" aerial photography cameras, with vacuum backs, but Gigapxl has taken steps to ensure the maximum performance of their equipment. Ross has not.

And, as far as size goes, there are photographers using cameras up to 20x24.

The "dream team" is really just the "hype team".

Re:Another Gigapixel camera

[izakage]

Genius.

Genius.

Re:Another Gigapixel camera

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Ross has not designed his own lenses the way the Gigapxl (so named to fit on a license plate?) project has, but the Gigapxl people aren't selling or giving out plans for their cameras, so he has no choice but to make his own. Regardless, Ross isn't just trying to capture images -- he's trying to figure out how to display them, too.

Once you've captured those hundreds of millions of pixels, how do you make sure I see them all in a way that impresses me the most? Gigapxl is just making standard flat prints, but that's just the beginning for Ross.

aQazaQa

Resolution of Eye?

[bdigit]

What would be the comparable resolution that the human eye can see in someone with 20/20 vision?

Re:Resolution of Eye?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be difficult to say, because the eye scans an image by moving around rapidly. There is only a very small area in the centre of vision where we can see anything with any detail, so the eye moves over the detail in a series of quick movements and the mind stitches it all together later. Therefore, the way our eyes (and brain) create an image is not to do a 'snapshot' of a single moment in time but to let the eye roam over a scene and then for the brain to assemble it into an image dynamically.

Re:Resolution of Eye?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fovea of human retina has only about 30,000 cones packed into a tiny 0.3mm diameter circle. Accounting for the geometry of the eye (and based on empirical evidence), this area can resolve about 0.0002 radians (0.005 radians for text height in 20/20 vision) under optimal circumstances. As the parent AC suggests, the only way we can "use" this resolution is by rapidly moving our eyes across the scene.

If you divide the surface area of a sphere by 0.0002 radians, you get an effective 360-spherical resolution of 314 million (100million * pi) discrete points. Therefore if you sat in the middle of a large chamber with 314 million pixels, your brain could probably be fooled into believing that you were seeing "reality" on the other side of the sphere (*assuming the sphere displays a suitable color depth and number of frames per second).

To put this in a bit of perspective, imagine you're about 5.5' tall and you're standing inside of a sphere with radius of 62.5 inches (your eye level would be right at the center). The surface of this sphere is covered with an 80dpi color display. You're allowed to look anywhere, provided you keep your head in the center of the sphere. To experience a small simulation of this, set a 17" (16" viewable) monitor to 1024x768 resolution. Now stand 62.5" away and imagine you can see monitors stitched edge-to-edge forming a sphere around you.

How big would a gigapixel image have to be? at 800 dpi, the image would have to be 1562.5 square inches or 35.4" x 44.2" (about 19.5x as big as an 8x10). To see all of the detail in this image, you'd need to view it from no more than 6.25 inches away. If you want to view the image from 62.5 inches away, you could print it at 80dpi on a 354" x 442" screen (29.5' x 36.8' = ~1086 sq-ft, or nearly 1/4 of a regulation NBA basketball court).

When the day is done

[eclectro]

they are going to measure the size of that new CCD sensor in that new camera and discover that it is exactly 42 mm square.

Re:When the day is done

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I doubt it. The CCD on my camera with a paltry 13.5 million pixels is 864 mm square (36x24mm). A billion would surely require a much larger area to get good colour and low noise.

Already being done

[jmanforever]

Check out http://www.gigapxl.org/

Been there...

[dj245]

Done that. Hell, we've even slashdotted that one before.

I for one...

[JediDan]

I for one am very excited about the future of graphics. Many people seem to be thrilled with the ever-widening use and availability of HD tv. And with some measure, I am too. However, there are many more things to do with displays that would truely expand their usefulness in both the realm of quality and quantity.
"Really there" video displays would make for some interesting experiences and shots from locations uninhabitable. Flat displays have plenty of room to expand into the markets of paper (you didn't think the newspaper was going to be back-lit, did you?)

Cheers for more/better display technology, the people that would bring them to the R&D table, and someday maybe the commercial market.

Monitor size?

[rackhamh]

What size of monitor will someone need to view this all on one screen???

And how much will it cost?

Less than flying to the location to see it for yourself?

Re:Monitor size?

[Overzeetop]

Well, just to print it (at 300dpi) is going to yield an 85x130" "photo". I suppose if we let it slip to a wider ratio, that's 60"x185". There are 60" printers (okay, plotters) out there, but Epson doesn't exactly give them away free-after-rebate when you buy a digital camera. Yet.

(I don't even want to guess how much ink that would take, but at OEM ink prices you could probably buy a small used car for the same money)

Re:Monitor size?

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Somewhere I saw a digital printing system that used lasers to expose color photo paper directly, something like that might be... no, the army couldn't even afford one that size.

Re:Monitor size?

[Anonymous Coward]

What size of monitor will someone need to view this all on one screen???

A gigapixel monitor, I presume.

I guess...

[khelms]

I better start shopping for a bigger hard drive.

Re:I guess...

[un1xl0ser]

Yeah. That's not off topic at all mods.

Try again.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

Maybe a few more details over @ the boingboing coverage of story...

Slightly OT Rant

[Shadow Wrought]

Is anyone else tired of the use of "Dream Team?" My first thought was the 1990 (or was it 1992?) US Mens basketball team in lab coats scratching their heads. Or maybe OJ's defense team. It just seems that the phrase "Dream Team" jumped the shark a long time ago and really needs to be retired.

Re:Slightly OT Rant

[mattkime]

hm...maybe Dream Team would be a good name for those in charge of the war in Iraq...

Re:Slightly OT Rant

[Clod9]

I was tired of it almost immediately after it was first used. Those basketball players acted like assholes, exactly the kind of American travelers to foreign countries that make me cringe (I also am American).

To this day, when I hear the phrase "Dream Team", I think "collection of idiots who should go back where they came from and crawl under a rock."

The "You are there" feeling

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

Uhh, excuse me if i'm being rude but....

Isn't that 'you are there' feeling attributed to actually BEING THERE, the smell, the sound, everything.. not just the view...

I don't think the absolute beauty of a location/person/anything can be captured with any device conceived yet...

yet...

Re:The "You are there" feeling

[fembots]

With this

Prior art

[shnarez]

Gigapxl Project, via NYUD.NET mirror. I think the photos there speak for themselves.

Not quite the point...

[Coz]

I'm not sure the poster really read all the article - it's not like this guy is the first to invent a gigapixel camera. Really, what he's build is a seemingly grain-free, "infinite focus" camera that takes large-format negatives, then he develops them (slowly, by hand) - THEN they get scanned at gigapixel resolution, and still show incredible detail.

You can look at his film prints "with your nose up to them", or you can scan them and zoom in on features down to the resolution of your scanner, apparently. Something innovative with basic cameras, film, and optics - not so innovative with the scanners and "gigapixel" resolution.

Or maybe I read the whole NYTimes thing wrong....

Sublime screenshot of Mt. Sopris

[GillBates0]

as taken from Gpx imaging system:

/\
/\/ \/\

Re:Sublime screenshot of Mt. Sopris

[Anonymous Coward]

holy crap. It is like I am really there.

Re: Sublime screenshot of Mt. Sopris

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't look like much... maybe you should try my new 8.5 TP (terapixel) cam?

Just got it from Newegg.com for only $399.

Re:Sublime screenshot of Mt. Sopris

[daeley]

This just goes to show that trying to represent the real world digitally is ASCIIng too much.

Number of pixels important?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that the number of pixels was in line with the "megahertz myth" in that it's essentially unimportant compared with other factors like the quality of the lens etc. Is this true or not?

2.5 gigapixel photo

[mscdex]

I still think the 2.5 gigapixel photo is the best. The detail is incredible, the photo is interactive, allowing zoom capability. You can zoom all the way in and read license plates and see parking passes. http://www.tpd.tno.nl/smartsite966.html

Re:2.5 gigapixel photo

[Anonymous Coward]

What is on the roof above the front stairway on what appears to be the stadium building on the fight?
Bags of weed?

Re:2.5 gigapixel photo

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like they covered faces of the people they found in the shot.
Except for the dude on the far end of the bit gray building on the right.

Re:2.5 gigapixel photo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but there is room for improvement. If it was in 3D, then you could read the plate of the dingbat parked illegally on the sidewalk/bikepath. Hey, 77-VZ-N? -- you're lucky you parked behind that light pole!

Pixel count is not the only important thing

[Rolman]

There are several techniques that could be used to achieve such pixel count with current technology, so it doesn't really sound that interesting. It might be good to create a large, hi-res poster with a beautiful landscape. It's also nice that they want the massive datasets to be processed and stored in about 1/15th of a second, making it a lot more useable for artistic purposes.

But film still surpasses those qualities and not only because of resolution and speed, but color. What I'd be interested in is to have digital photography that goes beyond the current 24-bit depth (if only for internal computations and not actual output) and implements better CCD technology to compensate for its inherent problems with lighting.

I know there are advances in those areas, but unfortunately they've been very slow since the market is going for pixel count (MHz, anyone?). Until that trend changes, film will continue to be the better choice, regardless of what any dream team says.

Re:Pixel count is not the only important thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, most good digital cameras product 12-16 bits per attribute. Of course, they only produce one attribute per pixel due to the colour filter array layout (except for those such as the Sigma SD9 and SD10, which have different issues). So saying that current digital cameras product 24bpp images is misleading. Most SLRs could more properly be said to produce 12bpp images, which are interpolated out to 36bpp images when producting an RGB output.

Re:Pixel count is not the only important thing

[tgd]

Ummm... most prosumer and pro digital cameras, if not all, are higher than 8-bits per channel.

A $600 Canon Digital Rebel is 12-bit internally, and the RAW files are 12-bit. The camera takes each gray-scale 12-bit sample, knows what color filter its sitting behind and interpolates the color image (as a 36-bit color space) accordingly when you save as a JPG internally, but when you use RAW, the software on the computer gets the full 12-bit values. That 50% more information makes a huge difference when you have a lot of stops between your highlights and lowlights, or you need to tweak anything with your color.

I'd bet a lot of lower end cameras do that internally, as well.

Re:Pixel count is not the only important thing

[temojen]

Set your camera to "raw" mode. Then decode the images with "dcraw -4", and edit them with CinePaint or Photoshop Pro. Poof, you have 12-16 bit/colour images (depending on your camera).

2 reasons:

[temojen]

• Photographic artists tend to be highly technical.
• If you're going to have to hand develop an 8x10 photographic plate, then scan it on a unique, hand built drum scanner and post-process it on a supercomputer, the first question should be is this scene worth 4gigapixels?, and the second question should be is the lighting right?

Re:2 reasons:

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

If you're going to have to hand develop an 8x10 photographic plate, then scan it on a unique, hand built drum scanner and post-process it on a supercomputer, the first question should be is this scene worth 4gigapixels?

Probably not, based on your interpretation. But since suitable drum scanners are available off the shelf, and a "supercomputer" is not needed, just a particularly strong workstation, you question is not valid.

Re:2 reasons:

[temojen]

Wait... you know of a "particularly strong" workstation that can interactively manipulate a 190Gb image? (4G * 48b)

Storing one copy is one thing... storing multiple working copies and interactively working on them is another thing entirely.

Re:2 reasons:

[Anonymous Coward]

I got two words for you: "emerge gimp".

Of course, you need to have the right CFLAGS set. I recommend -O4 for this one -- make sure to use an O and not a 0!

Re:2 reasons:

[Anonymous Coward]

+5, Funniest shit on /. this week.

T3h l337 gent00 HAX0r ea7z 190 G1gZ 4 br8kf5t.

Re:2 reasons:

[vought]

Nitpick:

8X10 inch images are virtually always captured on film (polyester base) rather than glass plates. Today's film and film holders have good enough dimensional stability, and glass plates aren't needed to retain consistent focus across the entire image anymore.

Glass plates would be a little tough to mount on a drum scanner. I'm thinking some extreme heat would have to be involved.

Re:2 reasons:

[boots@work]

Not quite a workstation, but certainly not a supercomputer: an rx8620 can comfortably hold that in memory and kick it around fairly quickly. There are users (defense, oil/gas) who need to deal interactively with many-gigabyte datasets. I don't know if anyone would want a single bitmap of that size though.

how much your eye can see?

[u19925]

given eye's optics, you can resolve about 1.5 mega pixels. This is assuming that the picture is kept at a distance, so that it occupies about the same area as 50 mm lens would provide on 35 mm camera (or 3x2 feet picture kept at 5 ft away). This is theoretical limit based on perfect print. Since most photos have some artifacts, you reach saturation at a slightly higher pixel count.

If your monitor is more than 1600x1200 and if you want to do pixel by pixel comparison of two photos on a single monitor (each photo size 800x600), then it is not possible to do so without moving your head.

In order to see 1 giga pixel, you will have to be incredibly close to the photo compared to its size and also will have to move up/down/side to see the details at different places.

Higher magapixel beyond 4-6 MP is only good for cropping, zooming, scientific data etc but is not of much use as a single print, specially if it is to be viewed as a whole.

Re:how much your eye can see?

[sakusha]

Vision isn't just optics. It's also brain mechanisms of perception. The eye doesn't just sit there looking straight ahead, it is constantly in motion, moving the fovea (the center of the retina with the highest density of receptors) past areas of interest, sweeping across the image and scrutinizing small areas of detail.

Re:how much your eye can see?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect they're aiming for panoramic pictures. At an angular resolution of one pixel per 0.01 degrees, which is slightly above what human eyes can resolve where the retina's resolution is the best, a 360 degrees picture is 36000 pixels wide. Now let's assume you want about 120 degrees of vertical field of view. That means you're looking at about half a gigapixel (12k*36k). Double that resolution for good measure (and in case some people are closer to the picture than optimal viewing distance), there you are: 1 gigapixel.

Re:how much your eye can see?

[Anonymous Coward]

At the fovea, the area of best vision, resolution is 60 cycles/degree. A degree is roughly the width of your thumb held at arm's length. So about 60 vertical lines on your thumb at arms length would be just barely individually distinguishable.

This number is limited by the optics of the eye, not the spacing of detectors. There are about 6 million cones, used for day vision, and 100 million rods, used for night vision.

The spacing of cones would otherwise limit acuity to 150 cycles/degree at the fovea. The neat thing about that is that you can use the same kind of adaptive optics that astronomers use to correct for atmospheric aberation to project images of 150 cycles/degree directly onto the retina. Theoretically you can also use laser surgery to improve acuity beyond 20/20 vision using these same principles.

http://webvision.med.utah.edu/KallSpatial.htmlMore here

Does this mean ...

[__aamcgs2220]

... we can finally fit all of Sally Struthers in a single image?

no one has though of this yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

the most crystal clear zoom-able porn ever!

Cheap 500 MPixel camera

[Anonymous Coward]

Researchers at UBC in Vancouver have built a cheap 500MPixel camera. It's basically a flatbed scanner with a lens mounted to it. You can find the details here [PDF].

It can only take images of still objects, since the image is "scanned" in. The results are quite good. Some effort has to be spent repairing the acquired image (streaks and so on). Overall a cheap solution to the problem.

Light versus Substance

[voice of unreason]

Increased resolution would be nice, as would stereo photos. But I wonder if one thing that might help photos seem more real is to have them backlit in a realistic way. Look at a sunset in real life, then look at a photo. It's not the same, and I suspect that part of the reason is that the amount of light pouring into your eyes and spilling into the surrounding colors is very different than looking at dots of pigment, however fine. It may be that the best photographs may be produced on digital paper, where we can do some kind of backlighting to simulate the light we see in the real world.

Re:Light versus Substance

[10Brett-T]

You mean like positive transparencies on light tables?

Imagination..

[bitswapper]

"Computational scientists at Sandia, a National Nuclear Security Administration lab, believe a display system of the magnitude proposed by Ross will enhance the ability of its scientists to visualize and gain insight from massively complex data sets that can be understood only through human intuition, ranging from supercomputer-generated physics simulations to high-resolution satellite imagery."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein

Composition vs. Recording

[podperson]

One of the interesting possibilities for cameras with that much resolution is that photography can become a question of choosing a view of a larger recorded image rather than simply recording that cropped view.

This way you can crop your photos OUTWARDS and not just INWARDS after the fact.

This of course has all kinds of privacy implications too (why shouldn't the photograph be an all round view that includes the photographer?)

Re:Composition vs. Recording

[Animaether]

Of course you can already compose the image so that whatever is of interest is in view. And when in doubt: don't zoom in.

As for the photographer in the view - well, because > 180 degree fisheye lenses cost a bundle.
However, there's panoramic reflectors that allow this.
And, in fact, there's a popular thing done by CG artists for a year of 2 where they take a picture of a mirror-surface ball (ballbearings work nicely), and then use a panoramic image editor/processor (such as HDRshop) to change that image into a more traditional panoramic image or virtual environment (a la PTviewer or QuickTime panoramas)

Been done already

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gigapxl.org/

It's coming....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/cameras.ht m

Already done.

[skarphace]

I just read this article http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/09/163521 7&tid=126 called 'Japan-American Tech Deficit' today. It states that they have had them in Japan for quite some time. Someone needs to let these people know so they don't waste their time.

is digital really everything?

[Anonymous Coward]

as other posters made evident, a gigapixel image still doesnt approach the real thing (in the same way a limit of (really big number)/infinity approaches zero). so you just KNOW all the analog nuts are going to stick to nondigital formats no matter how high the resolution.

besides, while i agree that increasing a possible maximum resolution has many uses, don't you think that the best picture should have continuous, flowing color/lines rather than tiny single colored boxes that are supposed to be too small to matter?

Re:is digital really everything?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what reproduction method does that? Certainly not film which is made of of millions of tiny "color" crystals. The only difference between film and digital in that regard is that the film "pixels" are irregularly shaped with random placement. But they ARE THERE and they are always visible in even the finest grain films at modest enlargement sizes.

That's too many (really!)

[Duncan3]

OK, a quick look here for some hard numbers: Count and density of human retinal photoreceptors.

Shows only about 60 Million net receptors (rods+cones) in the human eye. Only 1/20 is for color, and almost none are for blue. So unless it's gonna be printed on the side of a building (which you view from far away) you only need a few megapixels for your little 4x5" prints.

Of course, that wont stop anyone...

Re:That's too many (really!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said they were going to use a gigapixels worth of data to make a 4x5 print?!? OBVIOUSLY the plans for usage of the image data are a little grander than that!

Re:That's too many (really!)

[Vellmont]

Yah, and if you had actually read the article (or paid attention to it) you would have noticed that the intent is to re-create grand scenes like a mountain in a "you are there" fashion. That's obviously not a dinky 4x5 print, but more like an entire billboard or something like a photographic Imax with a curved screen.

Gigapxl Project ... with FILM!

[xmas2003]

Attached is a submission I recently sent in that was rejected, but seems pertinent here.

Slashdot has previousely written about Max Lyons' Gigapixel Grand Canyon and also TNO's 2.5 Gigapixel office park which were both generated by taking many digital images and stiching them togather. Film is not quite dead though, as the Gigapxl Project is using a customized 9"x18" film camera - read more in their FAQ and how they have to worry about issues such as atmospheric transmission. They have an impressive image gallery that shows some amazing detail in some crops. Since a Gigapixel uncompressed 16-bit RGB image would be 6 GBytes, they can be excused for not making that available to /. readers. They hope to be able to eventually generate a four Gigapixel image.

Focus on the real task, instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, we all know that to create a "you are there" photographic experience is not the real task.

Why don't we put together a "dream team" which could work on the real solution: teleport me to the darn Mt. Sopris in Colorado, danm it.

I would rather take a shitty 3.2 Megapixel pic myselt at Mt. Sopris in Colorado then watch the gigazillion pixel image of it in my miserable pithole.

Don't waste time and effort on creating illusion, work on the reality.

Is this so much to ask to make me happy?

Mt. Sopris in Colorado--giga, nah 1 pixel

[FerretFrottage]

for black during a new moon at around 2AM. It's those "day folk" that need all those pixels. Mt. Sopris pic

I read the article on dead tree...

[swb]

...and his technique/technology was suspiciously absent from the article (which spent a great deal of time talking about his past artistic background). Might have something to do with his private meeting with Sandia people about his technology.

Does anyone know what he's doing that's really any different from using a traditional 8x10 and some slow-speed, fine-grained film?

The article's brief description of the camera mentioned mirrors and the very wide depth of field of his photos (objects in sharp focus at 4k and 16k feet distances) almost would make you think he was using some kind of multiple lens simultaneous/multiple exposure (allowing the camera to be sharply focused at multiple distances but exposed as one image).

I'm not a photog, so I don't even know if that's possible, but it sounds like an intriguing idea.

Re:I read the article on dead tree...

[odin53]

There was an article about him and his camera in the most recent Esquire magazine. He built the camera himself by modifying an WWII-era extra-large format camera that was used from spy planes and made incredibly detailed images in its day. He's an artist, not an engineer, which is interesting.

Obligatory:

[edrams]

Porn is going to be even more awesome soon!

Re:Obligatory:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Porn is going to be even more awesome soon!"

but alas, still not nearly as good as the real thing

wunders always wonder

[Tablizer]

"Imaging the new possibilities!"

- Mr. S. E. Goat

The Man just wants you to keep buying ink carts

[wsanders]

Like a previous poster says, the human eye has a finiat resolution. Of course there are always the people who spend $20K on a CD player and 0000-gauge speaker cables and claim they can hear the diference.

However, one application: A photographer could lay out all the items to be photographed for a catalog, for example, and then cover the assignment in one shot.

basically, though, The Man just wants you to keep buying ink cartridges.

/.'ed from .nyud.net:8090

[Anonymous Coward]

Artist/scientist 'dream team' assembles with goal of capturing and displaying gigapixel-sized images

December 09, 2004

An eclectic group of artists and scientists that organizers have dubbed the "dream team" of imaging and visualization are gathered at New York University this week to begin to create a photographic system capable of capturing and displaying a gigapixel - one billion pixels - of visual information in a single image.
The first Big Picture Summit, Dec. 8 and 9, is organized by artist-photographer Clifford Ross and co-hosted by Sandia National Laboratories and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

News archive

Ross says his goal in bringing together top imaging experts from leading scientific institutions is to bring closer to reality his desire to create a "you are there" photographic experience for those who have not personally witnessed the sublime beauty of natural scenes such as Mt. Sopris in Colorado.

"In the early 15th century, the impulse to render flesh more realistically drove the artist Jan van Eyck to invent oil paint," says Ross. "The same sort of impulse is driving me, except that I'm trying to capture a mountain. Pixels are simply 21st century oil paint."

The scientists have different but complementary goals. Computational scientists at Sandia, a National Nuclear Security Administration lab, believe a display system of the magnitude proposed by Ross will enhance the ability of its scientists to visualize and gain insight from massively complex data sets that can be understood only through human intuition, ranging from supercomputer-generated physics simulations to high-resolution satellite imagery.

"We have a lot in common with an artist like Clifford Ross and his quest to make extremely detailed images that evoke a powerful emotional response," says Carl Diegert, Sandia computational scientist. "We want to understand from an intuitive standpoint what it is that enables viewers to gain insight - for example, a visual metaphor that makes a human viewer comfortable and thus better able to interact with an image. Computer science alone is not likely to invent a means for scientists to intuitively comprehend highly complex problems."

"My own goal is to fill the eye with so much information that it overflows and reaches the human heart," adds Ross. "Art is emotional, but the path is technical, and virtually all the scientists involved in this effort know more about the technical aspects of imaging than I do."

Ross' newly patented R1 camera system (www.cliffordross.com/), which broke through the gigapixel barrier, has achieved some of the highest resolution single-shot images ever created. (Efforts by other photographers have digitally melded many smaller images taken over a period of time into single sweeping, gigapixel-sized landscape images.)

The quality of the first landscape images created with the R1 - the "Mountain" series - convinced many of the scientists involved in the Summit to join in the effort, says Diegert.

The 15 professionals invited by Ross to participate in the Summit include renowned artists, scientists and engineers from government agencies, and digital imagery experts from the entertainment and film industries. (See list of participants below.)

The project could have major implications for all industries that rely on precise imaging, including environmental science, space exploration, telecommunications, and homeland security, says Diegert.

The project has two parts. The first is to design and build a new camera, expanding on concepts embodied in the R1, that can capture a gigapixel of digital information at a speed of 1/15th of a second or faster.

The second part is to create the display system, which Ross likens to building an "electronic Sistine ceiling." It will have 16 times greater data display capabilities than one currently in use at Sandia, among the world's most advanced. The display would provide an overall view o

Another idea that will go nowhere

[spidergoat2]

...until the porn industry co-opts it.

Re:Another idea that will go nowhere

[superpulpsicle]

Can't wait till the day we download pictures 10 times the size of current mpegs. But hey, we can finally see all the hair!

Re:Another idea that will go nowhere

[Mr. KFM]

...until the porn industry co-opts it.

Yeah.. I'd highly doubt they'd want to use those.

The reason they don't have HDTV support is because then you could see every imperfection, thus taking all of the glamour out of it.

I wonder where I heard that..

Big Images, Little Processors

[Nom du Keyboard]

That sure blows my Photoshop memory budget out of the water for this year. Although I believe my current version can only handle a maximum of 900MP (300,000 x 300,000).

Re:Big Images, Little Processors

[Binary Boy]

300,000 * 300,000 = 90,000,000,000

Yes, that's right - 90 gigapixels

Of course that's just the theoretical top canvas size. I'd like to see you do anything in Photoshop that large with the current memory limits the way they are. The largest file's I've worked on in PS CS are panoramas around 70,000 x 15,000 or thereabouts, and boy that was fun (considering the 10 or 12 layers I had, plus adjustment layers). Reminds me of the old days!

Re:Big Images, Little Processors

[Nom du Keyboard]

I'd like to see you do anything in Photoshop that large with the current memory limits the way they are.

Obviously we need a 64-bit Photoshop to go with the IBM, AMD, or Intel 32/64-bit processors. 64-bit Photoshop would definitely be the single most compelling reason to upgrade to the next version.

What's IMAX res and bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any other commonly used hidef formats?

Yeah Right

[Greyfox]

I'm not going to click a link on slashdot that invites me to see the "Grand Canyon." Especially not in gigapixel resoluton.

Re:Yeah Right

[the_2nd_coming]

goatse.cx is no longer up as far as i know.

Actually

[Greyfox]

Here in Colorado you can still see the stars.

Already been done, old news.

[templest]

This little bad boy does up to 4 Gigapixels. There's lots of pretty pictures on the site, and insane zooms.

http://www.gigapxl.com/

I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome our new Gigapixel camera overlords!

RTFP

[phoebe]

The post says "capable of capturing and displaying ". Using modern film and a scanner will allow you to capture the data but doesn't help displaying it. From the article:

The second part is to create the display system, which Ross likens to building an "electronic Sistine ceiling." It will have 16 times greater data display capabilities than one currently in use at Sandia, among the world's most advanced. The display would provide an overall view of images at a very large scale while allowing viewers to perceive extremely fine detail.

Re:RTFP

[vought]

The second part is to create the display system, which Ross likens to building an "electronic Sistine ceiling." It will have 16 times greater data display capabilities than one currently in use at Sandia, among the world's most advanced. The display would provide an overall view of images at a very large scale while allowing viewers to perceive extremely fine detail.

I did read the post.

Processing a 4X5 chrome on a dip-n-dunk line takes what, 20 minutes? I would think that an optical profjection system is the most cost-efective and highest-quality way to display images quickly after exposure.

Projectors work quite well with slide film. I've heard that even static 35mm frames hold up quite well at over 100 feet. I'll have to go to the movies and make sure.

There's no need to introduce a scanner into the display part of this problem unless you must have the image in a digital form.

I have a Bausch and Lomb K-14 shutterless aerial lens similar to the one used in the R1. It's pretty cool - makes a 9X9 image on film, paper, or whatever photosensitive stuff you put exactly 24 inches behind the lens. But I don't use it for snapshots because it is a pain in the butt. (Besides that, with the Thorium in the rear element of the lens, it's slightly radioactive.)

I applaud Ross' work on this, but I don't see it as a necessary or even wise use of time and money that could go toward more innovative digital imaging projects.

A science geeks dream

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if you could use a zoom lens to take pictures of atomic structures with your gigapixel camera. Atoms are usually much less than 1 nanometer in size, zoom into 1 cm2 area see quantum mechanics in action. Of course the new gigapixel geeks will have to go underground and fight a repressive government that will outlaw gigapixel cameras in case they are used to enrich uranium.

You are here?

[Folmer]

Ross says his goal is to bring closer to reality his desire to create a "you are there" photographic experience for those who have not personally witnessed the sublime beauty of natural scenes such as Mt. Sopris in Colorado."
So he is trying to create the Total Perspective Vortex?

Read the article

[*igor*]

Clifford Ross already has a 1-gigapixel camera.

What he wants to build is a 1-gigapixel screen.

-jeff

Temporality

[AllenChristopher]

There are three important factors involved here.

The first is that the cone density, as per your link, is far from even. In the center of the visual field it is three times as dense as at the ege, so most of those 60 million sensors will in fact be involved in looking at any decently sized picture.

Second, the fact that only 1/20th are for color and almost none are for blue is misleading. The brightness sensors are vastly more sensitive to blue than any other wavelength, which is why there are few blue specific sensors. It's also why bluer papers and fabrics appear whiter and blue LEDs are so blinding.

A red light is sensed as colour with very little brightness activation, which is why it's so good for car signal lights and astronomers use red flashlights.

Even if all 60 million sensors were for brightness rather than color, we'd still want to match most of those 60 million receptor sites with a monochrome pixel. It's not as if resolution doesn't matter in a monochrome picture. Brightness variation enhances the lower resolution color image the eye detects. It means that all the receptors are valid for a question of useful resolution.

Finally, and most critically, the eye is not a camera. It is not a single fixed object on a tripod that has one chance to detect an image and move on. We have two eyes that are not completely aligned. That at least doubles the amount of information we get from a scene. We also take many impressions of an object every second and combine them all into one mental image. As we do this, our body jiggles with the isotonic muscle contractions that stabilize the head. The retina pulses with our heartbeat.

The result of a 60 million sensor image that goes through constant temporal antialiasing, comparison between two sources, and is combined with the logical memory of the visual cortex which can hold certain kinds of information about line structure even when the eye looks away for a moment is an image of unparalleled depth. For this reason a trained eye can easily tell the difference between a 300 dpi image and a 1200 dpi image from a decent distance away.

Those are just the *eye* issues. I haven't even begun to get into issues like moire that show up on a digital camera more often than they do for the eye. When you're looking at someone's hair your eye depends on the precise level of moire to tell you how that hair is constructed and recreate some information that the eye hasn't directly sensed.

There's no question that a trained person could tell the differencee between a 7 megapixel print and a gigapixel print in very little time.

Now the question is, having covered all that, why do the physical limitations of the eye have anything to do with the resolution required for ordinary 4x5 prints? All people are looking for in 4x5 prints is a likeness of reality, not the experience of it. Of coure a standard 3 megapixel camera will give you a very nice 4x5 that reminds you of the time you and she were in Amsterdam. If such a print is indistinguishable from reality for you, if it completely duplicates all the visual information you normally receive, you ought to get to the opthamologist.

All true but you miss the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you miss the point of a gigapixel image. It's NOT to make a really sharp poster size print. It's to make an image that you can interact with a bit like you can interact with the real world. For example can move around and see different parts of it or you stand way back and see it as a panoramma or get close and see an insect on a flower.

In "normal" photography the photographer "edits the world by selecting some small portion of it. A multi-gigapixel image just capures _everything_ and lets the view do the editing and exploring.

The chalange is finding a way to display the image data.

Re:All true but you miss the point

[Lehk228]

The chalange is finding a way to display the image data.

simple, get a billion midgets with Red, green, and blue lamps on dimmer switches to fill the grrand canyon, then a spotlight flashes into the sky with morse code instructions to reference each midget and tell them the dimmer switch positions.

giggles

[Doc Ruby]

How about just 1000 frames of 1Kx1K pixels, for a 30 second video? That's over a gigapixel. A picture's worth a thousand words, but a movie's worth a thousand pictures.

Wasn't new in 2002, still isn't new in 2004.

[jrkotrla]

On Dec 2nd, 2002 there was another "Breaking" the gigapixel barrier story here on /. now in 2004 we're doing it again. This Digital Macro Camera http://www.metis-group.com/ takes 3.5 GP images digitally. Ok, so it's a monster scan back, but that still is a lot easier than his new system which has nothing to do with digital imaging except for the scan. Which he didn't do. ughh..

Re:Wasn't new in 2002, still isn't new in 2004.

[PenGun]

Another unbeleivably shitty website, what is it with artists anyway?

PenGun
Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

Ask the Japanese....

[shredluc]

They already have a GigaPixel cameras as posted here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/arc hive/2004/12/09/gadgetgap.DTL

Quote from article:

...-party accessory vendors). Gigapixel digital cameras. Laptops so tiny that "My...

Next: GigaPixel cell phones .

Personally i'm holding out for Terabit. Nothin like a picture the size of a city block.

Dumb

[PenGun]

It's a large format film camera folks. This tech is over a hundred years old. Of course scanning a huge negative wil produce a huge file.

Dumb.

PenGun
Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

picture of Mt. Sopris

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.peakware.com/encyclopedia/peaks/photos/ sopris.htm

egad

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I realy need this NO, my 7MP SLOW, I can only speculate how painfull anything else will be. Beyoned the pixel is where we need to go.

We talking pixels or Pixels?

[Fussen]

I can see people putting huge film onto drum scanners and just letting it fly, and I can see the epson scanner pulling in a 100 megapixel image, but I can't seeing the resolution being 100 Megapixel, or a Gigapixel.

At a scanning resolution like that, the film grain is just going to spread over the pixels, which is an awesome thing about analog systems. But when scanning, a 100 megapixel image may have the same resolution as a 50 megapixel image. Even if you use a really nice film or even a 70 MM Hassleblad film camera, the scans will only truly match the absolute clarity of the film.

Films (movie style) are natively 35mm. You enlarge that a screen and you can clearly see the limits of the resolution. Cineon film codec format is 3656 x 2664 pixels. At that resolution, editors/effects creators can see the limits of the film grain.

You can't create resolution out of source that didn't exist.

Covered in today's NYTimes

[14erCleaner]

This was covered in the Technology section of today's New York Times (here).

Before you start flaming the guy about "gigapixels", understand that Clifford Ross has built a film camera that records astonishing amounts of detail, including the Mt. Sopris picture. He's an artist, but also has done innovative things with optics and film.

Also, you gotta like a guy who owns the IP rights to both Tom Swift and Babar the elephant!

For goodness sake people!!!!

[syousef]

Gigapixel might sound cool, but there are very few real applications and a lot of downside to Gigapixel images.

First of all consider that only 4 of the bastards will fit on a DVD. For 6 megapixel uncompressed raw you could hold 750 pictures. Better yet you can hold 4500 pictures compressed down to 1Mb each. Storage costs money. If you want them to be convenient you're going to want to keep them on a hard disk (which costs significantly more than DVD per gig).

Next consider that manipulating the pictures will be a nightmare. You'll need something more specialized than Photoshop which, even when supplied with the latest desktop machine with plenty of memory and processor power will slow to a crawl on an image much larger than a few tens of megabytes. There may be an argument for a 30 or 40 megapixel camera, but until the rest of the technology advances the megapixel count just isn't a bottleneck for most photographers.

Also consider that if you want a Gigapixel you can do that today with 84 SLRs (84 x 12megapixel - or 167 x 6megapixel if you want to go cheaper). If the subject is nice and still, you could do this with 1 camera and 84 shots.

This is interesting stuff. Its just not very practical, particularly for the hobbyist. Photography is an expensive enough hobby without pushing absurd limits. I'd rather see CF cards come down further in price, and particularly dSLR and lenses come down in price. I'd like to see image stabilization and 10x optical zoom and beyond become standard. (The image stabilization part won't happen any time soon thanks to IP law)

While we're at it I'd like to see dSLR equipped with a 2nd CCD in the viewfinder or in place of the mirror so you have the choice of an optical viewfinder or CCD on the screen. Better yet I'd like to see the CCDs become so good that you truely don't need an optical viewfinder or mirror. (This means they'd have to work well in low light and not cut out momentarily when the picture is taken). ie. I'd like to see the SLR merge with the point and click into something truely revolutionary. Heck I'd even want to see waterproof cameras as standard before I would want to see a gigapixel camera.

Re:It's been done better than that

[radon28]

Check out the Gigapxl project.

Resolution

[Axel2001]

One thing that has always been present in the "modern" realm of photography is obsession over image size. Serious studio and wedding photographers often use medium format cameras, and some use large format (4x5" or larger). For what I enjoy photographing the most, landscapes, the view camera cannot be beat for control over images.

That being said, I have used 4x5, medium format, 35mm, and SLR and "p&s" digitals, and I can't say that I ever chose the tool I used based solely on its resolution. The "gigapixel revolution" is being fueled by equipment-crazy gadgetheads. And to each his own...

But much more worthwhile is to discuss lighting, technique, and photographic style. Concentrating on the equipment you use to create art is like concentrating on the paintbrushes that Salvador Dali used when painting his The Persistence Of Memory. You miss the overall point and appreciation of the artform.

Movie film a bad comparison

[temojen]

35mm Cinema film is much lower quality and faster (bigger grain) than the best 35mm still film. Shooting stills on 35mm you can afford better film (you don't need several meters/minute), and you can take exposures longer than 1/24s. Sure, the scans will only match the absolute clarity of the film, but on 35mm using Fuji REALA or Velia the quality is way way better than the best APS-C CCD (most DSLRs). If you use a medium format or larger camera, it blows the 35mm quality away. A 6x6 negative or slide can be scanned to about 8000x8000 pixels (64Mpix). Imax movies use high quality 70mm film, but they still have to use a high shutter speed (48 frames/second).

ILM, CGI, eh ?

[Animaether]

This is the same ILM that launched the OpenEXR initiative, right ?
That digital image format which allows, among other, storage of data with a dynamic range that film can't even dream about capturing ?

There's absolutely no particular need to 'compress' contrast (I suspect this means fitting the black and white point of the film in a 0.0 .. 1.0 range, applying a curve (log?) to the result, to make it pretty), as they could just take a clipping from the range caught on the film.
In addition, CGI can be rendered within any range you like.

As for resolution.. I'm not sure if this is a 'trade secret' at ILM, but common resolutions have always been 1k, 2k and 4k. Sometimes a company will work with 1.5k and interpolate that up to 2k for final output, just to save some time and get a softer image whilst they're at it - hey, sometimes people add 'film noise' in post, just to match stock film. eek.

Anyway, check out the OpenEXR site, log in to the downloads area, and there's a nice big StarWars shot with R2D2 and whatnot in OpenEXR format available for you*.

* though it may have been removed - I seem to recall something like that on othe openexr-announce list.

Just my 2cts.

Re:ILM, CGI, eh ?

[Aidtopia]

This is the same ILM that launched the OpenEXR initiative, right ? That digital image format which allows, among other, storage of data with a dynamic range that film can't even dream about capturing ?

Yes, one of the points of this talk (about two years ago) was the need for OpenEXR and how they hoped all the CGI tool providers would jump on board. But, at the time, they were still resorting to compression because they couldn't use a wide dynamic range all the way through the process. I don't know about the current status of OpenEXR.

There's absolutely no particular need to 'compress' contrast ... CGI can be rendered within any range you like.

The point made by the speaker was that the CGI tool makers did not support wide dynamic range and that was why ILM was pushing OpenEXR. Not all of their tools are home-grown. They use a lot of off-the-shelf products (hardware and software) which are built for 24-bit color.

The trick is to work on slices...

[Animaether]

190Gb in a single image is challenging even for 'consumer' filesystems.

But anyway, the trick is not to load a 190Gb file into memory. You load a small chunk of it.

And if the chunk is small enough, you can certainly load/unload chunks as you go in order to get interactive performance.

The only time the entire image would be affected is if you are affecting the entire image - e.g. brightening the whole thing or somesuch.

If you're just zooming/panning, however, no need to address the entire image.

And yes, there's plenty of file formats which make this easy.. TIFF for example, and any RAW file even better (as any pixel location should be in a predictable location on the drive, without need for decoding)

Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now show me a monitor that can display over a gigapixel

jpeg virus !!!

[urantia007]

I dunno about you guys but one of the pictures from that site appears to have the Jpeg exploit virus inbedded in this picture here: http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel_strip. jpg half way loading it up and it set my AV off telling me this jpeg was a virus. Could just be a false alarm, but i thought i'd warn you all anyway.

What Ross REALLY DID

[Anonymous Coward]

Ross reversed the process that makes a LASER work. Used mirrors to concentrate the image before it strikes the film... I compliment him and hope he becomes a gazillionaire for doing that. Future spaceships needed such an imaging system to see objects far ahead. His step makes fast space travel doable.

Re:What Ross REALLY DID

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you smoking, homeboy?

That's called a "telescope"

What ross did was create a very large format camera. Quite simple really.

Space travel will always be limited by the speed-of-light problem.
If there's something relatively stationary in your path, and it takes X amount of time for light to travel from you to it and back, you'd better be able to change course enough to miss it in less than X time. /do not feed the trolls

Just Remember

[Trystian]

No matter how many gigapixels are contained within an image, the compression on said image will be superb if they leave the lenscap on. =)

hyper realism

[psytrance]

i've seen ross's mountain pic in a gallery in NY this summer, it is indeed extremely impressive.

hyper-realism is a term coined by canadian artist char davies, former founder of softimage. she defines it as the bottom-up approach to simulating reality. she actually SUCCEEDED in making people perceive what they see as reality-quality, people bursting into tears when they remove the HMD and so forth. very interesting and worthwhile to look into. there was a very inspiring salon.com article titles '3-d epiphany' about what charlotte was doing in 1998(!!):
http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/1998/ 06/13/featu re947640934/index.html?pn=1

her website is http://www.immersence.com/

i'd love to see slashdot cover her.

100 megapixel telescope

[peter303]

The Kepler planetary telescope has a 100 megapixel camera . I heard it might be triple before launch next year.

He is taking darkroom outdoors, direct to paper

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been cameras this large for years, mainly for shooting newspaper plates. They just, as you can imagine, are a bit unweildy for the field. It seems a bit like the giant 16 x 20 inch Polaroids, with a larger print and without the instant chemistry... For the gear you would have to tote around you have to go back to the 1850s, where the plates had to be developed in a tent or wagon in the field. He can take the image somewhere else for development, but he still has to carry a huge "backpack"

He is taking the concepts used in all these areas, A vacuum easel to hold the paper/flat and tossing them in a field camera (sort of like a giant speed graphic, the 4 x 5 inch camera you saw actors playing reporters use in films of the 30's and 40's). And somehow just rolling the paper back up, to take to a roll processing chemical photo lab.

You can buy photographic paper in larger sizes than film... it is just a larger emulsion substrate, and takes longer to expose.

Burning and dodging and color correction (color reciprocity -- color shifts for differing exposure times) even inversion reversal of the image if print paper is used for the exposure and the image will still be a negative--- all this is done post scanning, on what has to be a huge ass drum scanner. You only have to worry about optics at two stages, the exposure and the scanning... no enlargement necessary.

Huge ass drum scanners are not that hard to find, as many times huge illustrations are scanned by them.

His innovation was in taking considerable care and effort to tweak preexisting processes no one else would have considered, merely because they are too inconvenient for most uses, and using them in a way almost all would think overkill, to the point they never would have considered it.
You know, like they might actually want to make money with their photography, or something.

Not to mention

[StarKruzr]

the recent (within the last few years) proliferation of digital minilab systems which eliminated one of the few major roadblocks to digital photography acceptance over traditional film: the inability to make silver halide prints from digital.

I am a field technician for a major photographic company and am routinely awed by the quality of images that these machines can turn out.

Film IS going to go the way of the dodo.