Seitz's 160 Megapixel Digital Camera

An anonymous reader writes "Digital cameras had been lagging behind Moores law for a while, but Seitz has taken a massive step forward with their announcement of a 160 Megapixel digital camera! At almost 20" long, with a price tag of around $36,000, and with on-board gigabit ethernet to copy off the image it's not exactly going to take on the consumer market, but how long before we see this resolution in a mobile phone?
Even with todays current range of digital cameras massive images are possible — such as the amazing 720 Megapixel image of Sydney Harbour"

Comments

This is not a digital camera

[denisbergeron]

It's a lens with a scanner !
Fast scanner, big resolution scanner!
But a lens with a scanner !

Re:This is not a digital camera

[dmatos]

denisbergeron is correct. If you look at the specs, it says the sensor is a "TDI" sensor. This sensor scans across the focal plane of the camera. It is 7500 pixels tall, with 2500 each R, G and B pixels. The full pixel colour is interpolated for each pixel.

I think it's neat that they use the same "digital back" module on a 360 degree panoramic camera. The camera rotates at a constant rate, and the sensor can then capture the 360 degree image.

The only thing to watch out for with the 160MPix camera is the rolling shutter. One side of the image will be captured almost immediately, but the other side will be captured 1 second later (at max speed, max resolution). With moving subjects, this can lead to lots of strange image artefacts - squishing or stretching, multiple images, etc. Their website has a couple of images where this effect has been used artistically, but a tripod would be absolutely required to take a decent image of a still subject.

Re:In a camera phone? Why?

[DrDitto]

Diffraction ultimately limits the useful megapixels in digital photography. You cannot replace film/sensor area, and the economics of building large sensors will make them extremely expensive in the forseeable future.

I use a 4x5" large-format film camera. With 20 in^2 of film area and a flatbed scanner capable of 2400dpi, I get 115 megapixels. A drum scan at 4000dpi gives me 320 megapixels if I wanted. And because the sensor is huge, diffraction doesn't hurt me unless I stop down my lens to f45 or f64.

Now many say you can get this quality through stitching dozens of digital captures together....if that is your sort of thing.

Diffraction, shmiffraction...

[SnowDog74]

Negative Refractive Index... specifically read the last paragraphs about superlenses and breaking the diffraction limit.

We're not talking science fiction. The concept has been tested in practical application and yielded orders of clarity beyond the diffraction limits of the wavelengths of light being captured.

Optical Limits On Miniaturization

[Steve B]

how long before we see this resolution in a mobile phone?

Never. The basic limit of resolution you can get is set by the Rayleigh criterion:

sin theta = 1.22 * wavelength / lens diameter

where theta is the angular diameter of the smallest detail that can be resolved.

Using a 5*10^-7 m (green light, more or less in the middle of the visible spectrum) and a 0.01 m diameter lens (which is generous for a mobile phone), this gives us a 3.5*10^-3 degree angle as the minimum amount of viewfield that can be covered by one pixel. Thus, a picture with a 20 degree viewfield* would be, at most, 5700 pixels in each dimension, or 32.5 megapixels.

*Of course, a viewfield could be wider, but getting a wider-angle picture without distortion raises a whole other batch of problems if you have to do it in such a small package.