As manufacturers of consumer digital cameras compete in increments, adding one or two megapixels to their latest models, David Brady of Duke University is thinking much bigger. Working with the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he is designing and building a camera that could achieve resolutions 1,000 or even 1 million times greater than the technology on the market today.
The goal of reaching giga- or terapixels, says Brady, is currently being held back by the difficulty of designing a spherical lens that will not distort small areas of a scene. His idea is not only to modify the shape of the camera lens -- making it aspherical -- but to link together thousands of microcameras behind the main lens. Each of these cameras would have its own lens optimized for a small portion of the field of view.
"Now, when you use a camera, you're looking through a narrow soda straw," says Brady. "These new cameras will be able to capture the full view of human vision."
The final result of the three-year project should be a device about the size of a breadbox, though Brady hopes to scale the technology down to create a single-lens reflex camera with a resolution of 50 gigapixels. (Paper CWB2, "Multiscale Optical Systems" is at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14).
Greg Hawkins wrote:
I have to be honest, there isn't that many things that i want to look at, with that much detail. I also did hear that canon is working on the digic 100 processor that will be able to process 1 frame per 15 seconds, and sandisc is working on a 1 TB card that will hold 4 photos per card.
I have to agree with you. You would have to have a really special need for a camera with 50 GIGApixel resolution. Not even professional shots for billboards need that much detail. And they would almost have to have multiple paralell processors to even be able to store the picture on a card in the most efficient compression system available. Never mind shooting in raw.
However, I can see this technology being developed for the next generation or two of deep space telescopes.
As manufacturers of consumer digital cameras compete in increments, adding one or two megapixels to their latest models, David Brady of Duke University is thinking much bigger. Working with the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he is designing and building a camera that could achieve resolutions 1,000 or even 1 million times greater than the technology on the market today.
The goal of reaching giga- or terapixels, says Brady, is currently being held back by the difficulty of designing a spherical lens that will not distort small areas of a scene. His idea is not only to modify the shape of the camera lens -- making it aspherical -- but to link together thousands of microcameras behind the main lens. Each of these cameras would have its own lens optimized for a small portion of the field of view.
"Now, when you use a camera, you're looking through a narrow soda straw," says Brady. "These new cameras will be able to capture the full view of human vision."
The final result of the three-year project should be a device about the size of a breadbox, though Brady hopes to scale the technology down to create a single-lens reflex camera with a resolution of 50 gigapixels. (Paper CWB2, "Multiscale Optical Systems" is at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14).
That's not a new idea and it's already been constructed and used is astro-photography. I'll look for the site and link it when/if I find it again. About 4 years ago I was contracted to create a presentation video for it. There was one extremely large aspherical lens (I dunno the number of elements) over the sensor array and each sensor (I think they were CMOS) had it's own custom lens - again aspherical and I assume a multi element construction. If I remember right there were 800 24MPx sensors: MF Digital back chips used by some famous make, I forget.
Bifurcator wrote:
That's not a new idea and it's already been constructed and used is astro-photography. I'll look for the site and link it when/if I find it again. About 4 years ago I was contracted to create a presentation video for it. There was one extremely large aspherical lens (I dunno the number of elements) over the sensor array and each sensor (I think they were CMOS) had it's own custom lens - again aspherical and I assume a multi element construction. If I remember right there were 800 24MPx sensors: MF Digital back chips used by some famous make, I forget.
