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How About a Gigapixel Digital Camera? 52

Posted by michael from the eye-spy dept.
vcullen writes "Ever wondered where digital cameras will end up? What about a 1 Gigapixel digital camera? It would certainly beat the latest array of new digital cameras - the biggest of which only has an 8.2MP sensor! The 1 Gig Digital Camera might not quite fit in your pocket but the thought of it does make one's mind spin a little. The European Space Agency is building this massive camera (actually it's made from 170 cameras) for its Gaia space telescope, due for launch in 2010. Why? They want to map the entire universe 'down to a resolution one million times fainter than the human eye can see.'"
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How About a Gigapixel Digital Camera? More

How About a Gigapixel Digital Camera?

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  • Pixels don't matter (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:46AM (#10212573)
    All that matters is the lens. By Allah, an 8.2MP camera with a quality nikon lens is better than a 1GP pixel camera with a plastic lens. When will people learn?
    • Hm, but an 8.2MP camera with quality nikon lens is not better than a 1GP pixel camera with a quality nikon lens. zo I guess they do matter somewhat?

    • Re:Pixels don't matter (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, the four-pixel image of me is really accurate, you can nearly see the skin pores if you squint a little.
    • The best quality optics in the world won't get you past the diffraction limit, so the physical size of the CCD matters too. The diffraction limit imposes the condition that cramming ever more pixels into the same area eventually becomes fruitless: there's no more information to be had in that area. You want more information? Increase that area.

      That said, I have no handle on how the cost/benefit curve looks assigning funds to improving either the optics or the CCD in different proportions.

      Matt...

      • The best quality optics in the world won't get you past the diffraction limit, so the physical size of the CCD matters too. The diffraction limit imposes the condition that cramming ever more pixels into the same area eventually becomes fruitless: there's no more information to be had in that area. You want more information? Increase that area.

        It's actually the size of the aperture, not the image plane, that imposes diffraction limits. On the image plane, the limit is imposed by the size of the beam waist
  • And you were complaining when they shut down Hubble! Is there anything Hubble could do that this can't?

    Well, I'm sure there is. But what, praytell?

  • How about fewer, but faster (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rufus88 ( 748752 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:48AM (#10212594)
    Rather than try to fit a billion pixels in a handheld camera, why not try to make sensors that operate much faster. If you could capture a hundred images at current resolutions in the same amount of time as it takes to capture a single image, you could rely on vibration-induced motion of the camera, and use motion estimation techniques to calibrate the images. Then you could use a splatting technique to sum up the images on a higher resolution grid to create an effective 100-fold resolution increase.

    Of course, you wouldn't want to use a tripod with this, or perhaps you'd need a special tripod which intentionally generates random vibrational motion. Sorry if this is stupid, I'm just brainstorming here.
    • RTFS, it's a big giant space camera. however, I read your post, and I appreciate that it's just brainstorming without thinking. I still don't care. it's made out of lots of 9 megapixel CCDs that are 4 or 5 times bigger than normal sensors.
    • is known as supersampling, and is used by security cameras to take several frames of footage and use this information to produce a high res version of the image.

      So whilst you cannot really introduce fake information ala charlies angels and find the bad guy, if you have several frame you can clear it up substantially.

      You can also undo motion blur, which is cool (I haven't the foggiest how they do it, probbaly some huffman transforms and a bit of luck!)

      How About a Gigapixel Digital Camera?

      Yes please.

      Bu
    • This is definitely not the way to do it. If you need interpolation via changed lens configuration, why not shake a lens element in a controlled way? Shaking the whole camera body is just stupid, and I highly doubt the noise from that will be recoverable.

      Also, you will most likely not be able to "capture a hundred images at current resolutions in the same amount of time it takes to capture a single image" in the near future. Modern sensors have massive noise as it is; they will not be able to capacitate a h
    • This is definitely not the way to do it. If you need interpolation via changed lens configuration, why not shake a lens element in a controlled way? Shaking the whole camera body is just stupid, and I highly doubt the noise from that will be recoverable.

      Also, you will most likely not be able to "capture a hundred images at current resolutions in the same amount of time it takes to capture a single image" in the near future. Modern sensors have massive noise as it is; they will not be able to capacitate a h

  • 1GP, eh? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How about that!
  • Does it have OnStar?

  • Simply amazing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:56AM (#10212667)
    Lately, the ESA has really shown itself to have the innovation and can-do attitude that brings successes like these. What makes it all the more suprising is that they rely on a budget that is a fraction what NASA spends. Their cooporation and teamwork should be an inspiration - and a lesson - to the NASA, and US Gov't, buraucracy, who seem to thik technological and scientific advancement come by magic if you throw your money at a private company. When will they understand that blind faith in the capitalist system can only lead to their slow decline?

    Put another way, it's not how much money you spend, it's how you spend it.

  • Gigapixel photography [tawbaware.com] using several camera's is not nearly new.
  • Then the DoHS would have to kill them all.
    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09 /08/19 52241

  • Nitpicking (Score:4, Informative)

    by KilobyteKnight ( 91023 ) <bjm.midsouth@rr@com> on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:08AM (#10212794) Homepage
    It would certainly beat the latest array of new digital cameras - the biggest of which only has an 8.2MP sensor!

    Not quite right [dpreview.com]
  • I just want a digital cam that all my manual focus Canon FD glass will mount on. Is that too much to ask?

    • Re:Bah (Score:1)

      by Glytch ( 4881 )
      One solution that comes to mind is to make some kind of adaptor to fit FD lenses on a medium format body, and use a medium format digital back. The FD mount is fairly small, and a good many medium format lens mounts are quite large, so there shouldn't be any problems machining an adaptor ring that allows focusing to infinity.

      Of course, a quality digital back can be fairly pricey.
      • A medium format body would be too deep to focus the lenses. Even if it wasn't, the lens wouldn't cover the sensor anyway.

        I've been thinking of just getting an A75 for snapshots, and keeping my AE-1, or perhaps waiting a while and saving up the $$$ to get a medium format camera and a Nikon D70.

        • Re:Bah (Score:1)

          by Glytch ( 4881 )

          Yeah, good points. The lack of full sensor coverage might not be a problem if the area covered has enough pixels, though. All depends on the specific back used. The focus problem would be a lot more difficult to overcome, though. It's a pity that Silicon Film's vaporware digital sensor never made it to market; it would be the perfect way to retrofit all kinds of manual SLRs.

          And the A75 is a great little camera for the price, as long as you stay with its' ISO50 or 100 settings. The noise is very noticeable

  • While the idea of a space telescope with such a huge sensor is pretty cool this resolution wouldn't buy much on the normal camera front.

    Today many of the 8MP cameras are a joke. The lens coupled with the sensors can't come close to getting that resolution.

  • What are you talking about, 8mps? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AllMightyPaul ( 553038 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:46AM (#10213233)
    You can already get 14 megapixel cameras from Kodak. And as other people have said, the pixels aren't important, it's the sensor and the lenses you use.

    http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/kodakdcs14n/
    • You can already get 14 megapixel cameras from Kodak. And as other people have said, the pixels aren't important, it's the sensor and the lenses you use.

      What are -you- talking about? Leaf makes units that are 22mpixel, and since they go on medium-format and large format cameras which use larger and vastly more expensive/better/simpler optics, the image is often vastly superior. They also use 16 bit per channel color; the Canon 10D for example, is only 10-12(I forget which).

      The Kodak 14n is an atrociou


      • It's exactly what consumers deserve for being too stupid to actually look at image quality

        I'm no photographer. I did just buy a camera that said on the box "THREE MEGA PIXELS". I bought it from Walmart. I knew it wasnt't a high quality camera, (brand was Mercury I think) but figured if it was 3 MP, it must take pictures that were at least 'OK'.

        WRONG.

        Got it home, tried it out and got web-cam quality pictures. Total crap. returned the camera and did some research. I've bought a second, different
    • Ah, indeed. I see that was just announced on Tuesday, so no wonder I hadn't heard about it.

      I find the idea, though, of a medium format digital camera kind of silly. But I guess it goes with the lenses for some Hasselblad cameras, as well as a few others, and as long as it doesn't mess up the field of view, then I suppose more power to 'em.
  • And how exactly wil ESA be getting the data from a 1G pixel survey of the universe back down here? Onboard 10Tb tape drive? Magic pixies? Sending such a vast quantity of information back down to earth with anything less than an optical frequency (read: laser) trasmitter (which dont exsist yet for spacecraft) is laughably unfeasable.
    • Maybe it can run gzip on the image successive times until it's down to a single byte, then just send that.
    • a 1GP image at (say) 16 bits of grayscale per pixel is 2GB. Say we take these at
      1000s exposure (quite short for serious astronomy, I would think), then the raw data stream is only 2MB/s. Lossless compression will reduce that pretty dramatically, although error correction and engineering data will bump it up. Plus some of the time not all of the field of view will be of interest.

      Perfectly within the compass of microwave links.

  • "Only" 8.2MP (Score:2, Informative)

    by rawgod0122 ( 574065 )
    OK there are a few things that need to be said about that number.

    First you can get cameras that have 25 MP sensors. They are called medium format. Only problem is you will be looking at tens of thousands of dollars (US) up to about $30k.

    Second I have a ~6MP Nikon D70. I can print 8x10" just fine and if I had a printer large enough 11x14 with a little bit of interpolation. One just does not need that many pixels to get good prints, and even less for a computer display.

    If you don't beleive me go check out
    h

  • Right... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @01:07PM (#10214007)
    So what's to stop them from pointing this fancy new camera back at the Earth? Perhaps it is not extra-solar objects that they are interested in...

  • How about FOUR of them? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dbirchall ( 191839 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @01:15PM (#10214099) Journal
    Pan-STARRS [hawaii.edu] will have a gigapixel Orthogonal Transfer CCD array [hawaii.edu] on each of its four telescopes.

    (The site surveys are going on right now, and I work at one of the sites being surveyed.)

    If you can put one of something in orbit, you can probably put a whole lot more of something on the ground for a whole lot less money. ;)

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