Robotic Camera Extension Takes Gigapixel Photos 102
schliz writes "Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a device that lets a standard digital camera take pictures with a resolution of 1-gigapixel (1,000-megapixels). The Gigapan is a robotic arm that takes multiple pictures of the same scene and blends them into a single image. The resulting picture can be expanded to show incredible detail."
Re:Not so novel (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Higher Resolution != Higher Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at the entire photo it doesn't look any better than a regular photo even if it contains much more information.
For years now there has been a push to larger and larger resolution photos with people often mistaking this with "quality."
All a higher resolution really allows you to do is zoom in more after a certain point. Which is awesome from a photo editing point of view, but for most people unimportant.
What you really want to be focusing on is the lens quality, zoom quality (lol Digital Zoom), noise, and other characteristics of the camera (e.g. ISO rating).
So it is great that they spent lot's of time doing this but it isn't all that interesting to average Joes or even serious photographers. We all really want better quality pictures, not bigger ones.
misuse of word resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
it has nothing to do with pixels per image, although you can have more of the object , at the same resolution, with more pixels
Re:Not so novel (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the MIT work is well known to anyone in this area. It's not that hard to google some of the keywords and get the MIT page. The CMU people either knew and ignored it, or they simply didn't do what most of the scientists at their institution usually do, which is read the standard conference papers in computer vision, and browse the web (just a little!!). It's not as if the MIT work was published in some obscure place.
Re:Higher Resolution != Higher Quality (Score:3, Insightful)
I was expecting to see good quality all the way down to the highest zoom. something like google-earth quality for the most part. They don't let you just keep zooming in past the point where the resolution has hit the wall like this does.
They have no business calling this a gigapixel image, everyone that reads that is expecting that's the resolution. In reality it speaks more for the pixel count than content.
Gigapixel picture != Gigapixel camera (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, if you take the entire photoset of Google Earth, you'd probably get a few peta-pixels worth of data. Ultimately, it all boils down to how much of that data is needed at any given time. You might need a low-detail, large-area image (e.g. view of Earth as a whole), or a high-detail, small-area image of your backyard. In either case, you wouldn't need more than at most a few dozen megapixels at any given time. It's unlikely anyone ever needs more than that size, whether they are studying galaxies or atoms, because the more detail you need, the less physical area you need covered, and vice versa.