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111-Megapixel CCD Chip Ships
georgewilliamherbert writes "EETimes is reporting that Dalsa has shipped a record-breaking 111-megapixel CCD image sensor to customer Semiconductor Technology Associates. The chip was paid for by a U.S. Navy SBIR project. At four inches across, a bit big for camera phones, but the 10560x10560 format will probably get professional digital camera users drooling."
Well sure sounds like that'll BLOW AWAY 35mm film and definitely be about comprable to 4x5 film.
I can't wait to get 10560x10560 resolution family photos named IMG_1000.jpg as attachments in my inbox...
I wish submitters would start linking to the "printable" versions of the stories: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=189500300&printable=true
I'd doubt many professional photographers are drooling over this. The market, at least in terms of commercial photograpgy, is about at its limit of need, in terms of the 32+ megapixel cameras. Manufacturers are now pushing the envelope for satelite and other advanced imaging. In most commercial applications, the current state of the art in terms of cameras combined with transfer and storage requirements is more than sufficient.
Here's a pic of the sensor itself: http://www.dalsa.com/shared/content/images/STA1600 _1_1200w.jpg. (Too bad there aren't any pics from the sensor...)
if a cheap ship ships cheap chips, how much cheap chips shall the cheap ship ship?
For actual consumer devices, higher pixel count doesn't always mean better pictures. Color quality, optics, processing, etc. can make a huge difference. We're limited largely by what our eyes can perceive and our display devices actually represent. I guess such huge resolutions might be helpful for "zooming" without needing the lens assemblies . . . but there's still atmospheric distortion to contend with . . . It's a shame TFA doesn't mention what this CCD is actually supposed to be used for.
How many bad pixels before the unit is considered faulty and can be returned?
Is this only for still images, or can it be used for moving images? (over time, like a movie, not emotionally, like a childs tear)
Obviously you'd need a heck of a data transfer rate for motion, but how fast could this pump data out, clear, and capture the next image?
You can imagine the developers on the phone to their competition...
What?? That camera's rubbish.... ours goes up to one-hundred and eleven!!
Well sure sounds like that'll BLOW AWAY 35mm film and definitely be about comprable to 4x5 film.
I was actually looking for a funny link, but this guy makes a great point -- a good scanner and a roll of that 4x5 film -- yes, four inches by five inches, absolutely huge compared to a 35mm roll -- will get you 100 megapixels of resolution for a couple thousand bucks.
It reminds me of a story I saw (on PBS or Discovery Channel) about modern medicine in developing countries. People will pay extra for a "digital X-Ray", even though the cheap equipment produces a digital image that has far less resolution than a plain old film X-Ray. But it's "digital", so it must be better.
And don't even get me started about overpriced digital stereo cable!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
... My family sends IMG_1000.BMP to my inbox. I think they like the lossless (non-)compression.
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They're used in the larger optical telescopes. Very expensive, and often only greyscale, they offer huge dynamic range.
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The best part about this announcement isn't the 100 megapixel size. Photographers can already buy large format digital backs for view cameras with 300 megapixel resolution (albeit for a hefty price). But they use multiple CCDs and require external power supplies and HDDs. This new chip opens up intruiging possibilities for a self-contained high resolution camera that requires much less power to operate. Still, a CCD of that resolution will generate raw image files of about 350 megabytes each, so portability will necessarily be compromised to a degree by storage requirements.
That thing must cost an arm and a leg. The failure rate of chips goes up exponentially with size and at 4 inches across yields must be next to nothing.
--aiee
I wonder how much that bad boy will cost after they send in the mail-in rebate.
Some sites have great explainations and demos.
This has nothing to do with image sensors, but does have some bearing on "what can eyes really see".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The fine article appears slashdotted, so I don't know if they cover this. The application which leaps to my mind for this detector is astronomy. Astronomers will pay big money for a better detector - I've seen a US$200k chip (2k x 2k pixels in about 1990, for use in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey camera.) Even at these prices, it is cheaper to get the same quality upgrade by improving your detector than by building a bigger telescope.
Astronomers run their CCDs at liquid nitrogen temperatures (to reduce thermal noise), and for UV astronomy they use "thinned" chips (etch/grind away the back of the chip so you can illuminate it from that side - otherwise too many photons are lost before reaching the light sensitive volume.) I'm not sure what other features astronomical CCDs require which might not be present in this chip. Pixel size shouldn't matter too much (except in its effect on noise) as you can design your camera to scale the image to suit the detector.
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It's interesting that this came up, since last week I was reading an article on the resolving power of the human eye as it pertains to photography and how to choose output resolutions. Short answer: 50 lines per degree of view. From there you can do some right-triangle trig to figure out how many line pairs should be perceivable for some output format based on how close you're going to be to it. For an 8x10 image, the author says 2300 pixels in the long dimension or 230 PPI would cut it (I didn't double-check his math). I tend to wonder if you don't have to introduce a factor of two in there somewhere, since to reproduce a "line" of resolution seems like it ought to require two pixels.
Of course, that's an oversimplification; hence the long answer. The human eye doesn't have a fixed number of "megapixels" that you could easily convert to a measurement of a photo or really even of another camera. First, you have the problem that the eye's "resolution" isn't evenly spread across the field of view: it's concentrated near the center, and thinner out in the periphery. This is why if you concentrate and try to pay attention to something that's not in the center of your field of view (that you're not looking directly at) it won't be as clear as when you look directly at it. (The exception is in very low light: your indirect vision is better at night vision.) However your brain reassembles the image and makes you think that you're seeing one great-big full-res panorama, when in reality at any one time you're only seeing a small part in "full rez" with the rest of your field of vision at something less, but with the full version available on-demand (by looking at it).
If you could actually do a 'screen grab' of the image your eyes were actually feeding into your brain, at any particular time, I think it would be a lot lower-quality than many people suspect. Almost without question, it would be lower quality than many photographs of the same scene. The depth of field is short, the resolution is concentrated in the center, as is the color, and there's a hole in the dead center of the image because of your optic nerve's placement on your retina. Your sense of sight works as well as it does, in large part, because of all the caching and postprocessing that's done transparently by your brain to the incoming information stream.
Really, when we compare a photo to our "sight," what we're really comparing is the photo to our brain's recollection of how it saw a particular scene, which might be very different from what our eyes actually took in, and further still from the 'objective truth' (if you believe in such a thing, that is) of what actually was there at that moment. The easiest example is color saturation: we tend to see and remember things as being far more colorful than they actually are: an "accurate" photo will therefore look dull compared to memory, so we compensate by oversaturating our photos to make them look more 'realistic.'
It's only possible to make comparisons between our eyes and mechanical cameras, and between our overall sense of sight and recording systems, for very limited cases. Even to answer a relatively simple question like "what's the eye's maximum megapixels?" completely would probably stretch the boundaries of currently understood optometry, neuroscience, and psychology.
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