Posted by Peter Cross on December 29, 2011 at 11:41 PM
I read today that the Army has a drone helicopter that it will be testing soon in Arizona before deploying to the Mid-East this spring. For those gear folks that have to have the latest and best, this one will sport a camera with a 1.8 gigapixel sensor. Will Canon or Nikon be the first to make this sensor available? Just think of the detail!
Posted by Paul DeCesare on December 30, 2011 at 12:52 AM
Just think of how much all the CF cards will cost that you'll need!
Posted by Jim Bullard on December 30, 2011 at 9:23 AM
FWIW Canon has an APS-H 120MP sensor. It is B&W only and designed for surveillance cameras. I keep hoping they will put it into a B&W only camera for people like me. 1.8GB is over the top for any normal photography. A 16GB card would hold only 8 photos and how often have you had someone ask you to make a print that required a 1.8GB file? That would be about a 34K by 51K pixel image. Printed at 300ppi the print would be over 9x14 feet.
Posted by Basil Greber on December 30, 2011 at 2:28 PM
Well, the sensor might cost a ton, but imagine the lens costs you could save by cropping that close-up of an eagle's eye out of your ultrawide/fisheye exposure.
Posted by Jim DeWitt on December 30, 2011 at 3:20 PM
But you could only take one photo a day, and then wait 24 hours while the camera writes he 1.8GB to your CF card...
Posted by Dennis Plank on January 5, 2012 at 12:24 PM
Just to add confusion to the mix, I just read something about a new QDX memory card standard coming out. It looks like a smaller CF card, and of course isn't compatible with anything else. It's supposed to be blazing fast. There's a blurb on Adorama's website about it: http://www.adorama.com/alc/news/QXD-memory-card-announced-by-Compact-Flash-Association. At 125MB/sec it would only take you 15 seconds to download that image. Still not very useful for high burst rates, but it ought to make awesome mega-landscapes
Posted by David Bostedo on January 5, 2012 at 4:41 PM
It's a pretty cool system, but I'm pretty sure there are multiple sensors involve, as it uses the ARGUS-IS sensor array.
Since it's arrays of cellphone camera sized chips, it does speak to the potential future of some photograhpy. One potential is that a large array of tiny sensors could be used to give very high dynamic range and high resolution across a large field. Think a digital view camera with better dynamic range.
Discussion
6 repliesSince it's arrays of cellphone camera sized chips, it does speak to the potential future of some photograhpy. One potential is that a large array of tiny sensors could be used to give very high dynamic range and high resolution across a large field. Think a digital view camera with better dynamic range.