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Robotic Camera Extension Takes Gigapixel Photos

Posted by timothy on from the ale-and-hugin-together-robotically dept.

schliz writes "Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a device that lets a standard digital camera take pictures with a resolution of 1-gigapixel (1,000-megapixels). The Gigapan is a robotic arm that takes multiple pictures of the same scene and blends them into a single image. The resulting picture can be expanded to show incredible detail."

1 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Higher Resolution != Higher Quality by Manip · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think this just proves that higher resolution doesn't result in a higher quality photo.

    If you look at the entire photo it doesn't look any better than a regular photo even if it contains much more information.

    For years now there has been a push to larger and larger resolution photos with people often mistaking this with "quality."

    All a higher resolution really allows you to do is zoom in more after a certain point. Which is awesome from a photo editing point of view, but for most people unimportant.

    What you really want to be focusing on is the lens quality, zoom quality (lol Digital Zoom), noise, and other characteristics of the camera (e.g. ISO rating).

    So it is great that they spent lot's of time doing this but it isn't all that interesting to average Joes or even serious photographers. We all really want better quality pictures, not bigger ones.