Mega-Camera
Posted by Tim.
You ever wonder what might happen if you took the “more megapixels = more awesome” theme to its logical endpoint?
I know Nathaniel and Brian will find this one amusing, if they haven’t already seen it.
160 MP! No, seriously, it’s actually that big.
And only a mere $45,000.
You know you want one. 
January 28th, 2008 at 11:24 pm Using
I missed the coolest thing about that camera. I just thought about the fact that it’s a full 160 MP camera. That would be a square image almost 13000 pixels on a side. Of course, it’s actually a 6×17 camera… so the chip would need to be 17 cm long. No one makes a detector that size or we’d be using them in astronomy.
The cool thing is that it’s actually a scanning camera. There’s a line array that moves across the focal plane at a very careful rate. That way you only have to buy a relatively inexpensive CCD line array. They’ve even figured out how to make the whole exposure only take 1 second.
You can get a lot cheaper scanning cameras though. There’s an awesome one that would fit in my big camera that’s only around $8K. It’s not as fast though. I think that might actually make for a cool effect because you’re effectively photographing different parts of the image at different times so anything that moves will get distorted.
February 1st, 2008 at 6:50 pm Using
That’s pretty slick. And big enough that you don’t have to worry about “cheating” and having your megapixels wasted b/c you run into being diffraction limited.
And man, trying to cool a 6×17 chip! Tubes!