350 Megapixel Camera 34
Remy Hathaway writes "Ars Technica just posted an article on the "MegaCam", a 350 megapixel camera. The original story is from the Honolulu Advertiser."
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!
oops (Score:2)
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its name changes by the minute... what next? "mepagrime"? "grimey pap"? "papery gimp"? "preppy game"?
Re:oops (Score:1, Funny)
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http://www-dapnia.cea.fr/Phys/Sap/Act
Re:oops (Score:2)
http://www-dapnia.cea.fr/
chars
Hmm... what I thought of instantly was the fellow that turned a flatbed scanner into a wide-field still image camera.
Building a megapixel digital camera from a flatbed scanner [sentex.net]
And the later revisions in the concept by interested folks with science as their tool of genius.
Industry always begins with hacking existing toys [rit.edu] Thus the ultimate reason the DMCA is a BAD BAD BAD law.
Improved Scanning Digital Camera [rit.edu]
I see the article is about an array of the imaging sensors with one bigass lens. I guess they'll get a quicker image this way.
Megaprime (Score:4, Funny)
So Optimus Prime can take pictures during battle?
350 megapixels really is More Than Meets The Eye.
Filesize of the pictures (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Filesize of the pictures (Score:2, Insightful)
Looking through the links I saw pleanty of images of the camera itself, but no actual images from the camera. Yes, yes, I know they're not going to put the +-1GB image on a site, but a largely scaled down and compressed sample for the gee-whiz factor would be nice.
Re:Filesize of the pictures (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Filesize of the pictures (Score:1)
Re:Filesize of the pictures (Score:1)
But presumably they'll be archived (at CADC?). So someone will have to handle them.
Re:Filesize of the pictures (Score:2, Interesting)
So it will likely be 16bpp, not 24. Astronomical images are usually FITS, not JPEG.
Large images like this are becoming the norm in astronomy. Double the dimensions of a CCD and you quadruple the file size. With mosaiced chips like this one, you can easily get monster images. Then there's the processing, where you're usually juggling several similar-sized images. Looks like CEA is addressing this [www-terapix.iap.fr].
Incidentally, if they did want to compress these, some lossy algorithms (wavelets, Starck) do well on astronomical images. Most of what you lose in those cases is the sky noise, as long as you don't select too high a compression factor. The DSS did very well with 10x wavelet compression.
Re:Filesize of the pictures (Score:1)
No, megapixels.
Think of it this way:
bpp = bits/pixel
pixels * bits/pixel = bits
bits * bits/pixel = bits^2/pixel
no big deal (Score:2)
You could get in the ballpark of this by buying 40 off-the-shelf 5 Mpixel consumer cameras and 40 laptops to hook them up to. Voila--instant "200 Mpixel camera", plus the bandwidth to process and store all those images.
MegaCam???? (Score:1)
oh my... (Score:1)
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Additional info on their website... (Score:5, Informative)
The imager is made up of 40 silicon imagers, each of which has two imaging surfaces on it, for a total of 80 channels of about 4.3 megapixels each. There are gaps between the silicon imagers. Images they make have black borders around them so that the image spatially is like looking through a window with bars. The imagers are rectangular, and are set up in a pattern somewhat like this
HHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHH
The periods are due to slashdot's inability to do & nbsp;, & #160;, etc. The #'s I was going to use in place of H caused the lameness filter to spew "Too many junk characters." I guess I didn't realize I had a junk character account, nevermind that it is apparently overdrawn!
It takes a full ten seconds to get the data from the sensors, and there is a rotating shutter above it. The time to take the image and then copy it off the array is long enough that they can only obtain about 1TB of data on a typical veiwing night.
-Adam
Re:Additional info on their website... (Score:1)
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CCD mosaic (Score:2, Informative)
Total resolution is about 18000x18000. At 0.2" visibility (the best you get anywhere on earth), this gives 1 degree FOV. It is large in total pixels, but each chip is not. Largest single CCD ever made is about 63 Mega pixel. Largest in 35 mm digital cameras are 16 mega pixels. Mosaics are suitable in astronomy where they don't mind a line here and there not exposed.
The most important characteristic of astronomy CCD chip is back illumination which gives ultra high efficiency and extremely low noise.
I believe, there is another project where they plan more than giga pixel mosaic. But forgot the project name or link.
Damn review sites (Score:2)
Pixel resolution is one thing, but it's worthless if the batteries die in the middle of my family's vacation!
how many LOCs? (Score:2, Funny)
Skip the beowulf jokes but (Score:2)
Still, I don't see this camera's technology coming out for home use - there's just no point. Could you imagine emailing home photos to relatives (photoshopping would also take forever and huge amounts of RAM). Rather, cameras with better colours sensors (as mentioned in previous
Now emailing dayatthebeach.jpg, estimated time 13d-4h-3m...