Max: .0000001 Mega-Pixel Camera
BBC NEWS | Technology | Single-pixel camera takes on digital
Researchers in the US are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the expense of traditional digital photography.
Being developed by a lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the single-pixel camera is designed to tackle what its developers see as the 'inefficiencies' of modern digital camera.
It currently resembles an old-fashioned pinhole camera and is the size of a suitcase, but assistant professor of electrical engineering Kevin Kelly told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that it is only 'the beginning of things.'
'Hopefully it will get smaller,' he said.
Researchers in the US are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the expense of traditional digital photography.
Being developed by a lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the single-pixel camera is designed to tackle what its developers see as the 'inefficiencies' of modern digital camera.
It currently resembles an old-fashioned pinhole camera and is the size of a suitcase, but assistant professor of electrical engineering Kevin Kelly told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that it is only 'the beginning of things.'
'Hopefully it will get smaller,' he said.
posted by Max Dobberstein at 1/25/2007 05:09:00 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting!
Sure, most cameras do throw away the majority of information gathered, JPEG compression (.JPG, the most popular compression form these days) can be tuned to compress a little or a ton, most cameras set it about middle and call it good.
However, for the professional photographer, this development isn't going to mean much. Most current middle to high end cameras come with an uncompressed (TIFF or .tif) setting. This doesn't throw away any of the image. The photographer or graphic artist or whomever, can later decide to compress or not in anyway they see fit.
A typical user taking snapshots wouldn't want to use TIFF because it would mean very few pictures on their media. So, this process will work well for those who are already compressing their pics. This sounds like it could work VERY well. We could begin to see inexpensive digital cameras become cheap, even disposable. As in a high resolution camera you pulled out of a box of Lucky Charms that you use once, download the pics to your PC and then throw away.
This also has some interesting military applications as well!
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