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"Dream Team" to Create Gigapixel Photo System 215

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-dreams-of-these-guys dept.
neutron_p writes "An eclectic group of artists and scientists that organizers have dubbed the "dream team" of imaging and visualization are gathered at New York University this week to begin to create a photographic system capable of capturing and displaying a gigapixel of visual information in a single image. The first Big Picture Summit, Dec. 8 and 9, is organized by artist-photographer Clifford Ross. Ross says his goal is to bring closer to reality his desire to create a "you are there" photographic experience for those who have not personally witnessed the sublime beauty of natural scenes such as Mt. Sopris in Colorado."
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"Dream Team" to Create Gigapixel Photo System More

"Dream Team" to Create Gigapixel Photo System

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  • Large Format film cameras (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:13PM (#11045495)
    Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

    Even my 4x5 camera yields over 100 megapixels when scanning film with a $300 Epson flatbed.

    • Re:Large Format film cameras (Score:5, Insightful)

      by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:20PM (#11045582) Homepage Journal
      People do seem to loose sight of the "best technology for the job".

      We just dont have anything that can capture 3 gigabytes of data in hundredth of a second... doing the equivilent with film is so easy.

      However working with 100 mpixel scans in photoshop is way too painful for me... i think i need to get a 4x5 enlarger.
      • One reason I think would be the better CCD that could be used in video equipment also. I know that movie film equals exist but they certainly aren't as easy to use as say a film camera.

        Some photographers have moved to digital simply because of the cost, film is expensive and one can shoot as many pictures as they like using digital without fear of waste.

    • Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

      Shhh... that's how they do it (well, that, slow film, and good lenses).

      I was just checking the site out yesterday. They have some pretty amazing pictures.

      Even my 4x5 camera yields over 100 megapixels when scanning film with a $300 Epson flatbed.

      I get about 20MP from scanning prints of pictures taken on my 35mm at 100iso. Pretty good for a camera made in 1980. I

    • "Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

      There are dozens of reasons to want very high resolution digital imaging. It cuts down on cost, waste, time, storage, and gives you many lighting options that you don't have with film (though film has its own advantages).

      The primary reason, though, would simply be that photographers are using digital cameras in many places where they work quite well, and they wo

      • The primary reason, though, would simply be that photographers are using digital cameras in many places where they work quite well, and they would like them to eventually be the primary workhorse for most photographic needs.

        I spend all day retouching photo's from these photographers. At this point I am of two minds over this. On one hand I like the fact that digital photos end up needing more work done to them than from a transparency. (People really miss film grain, and the colors are always not what th

        • "since digital photography has gotten so wide spread I am seeing much more "bad" photography"

          I understand your frustration.

          Film was hard to work with, and only people who knew what they were doing could extract useful results from it.

          Then some wingnut that thought he could play God introduced the concept of advancing film. Oh, that was a sad day. All of a sudden you had moron after moron taking shot after shot with no regard for the fundamentals.

          Then ... auto focus. The phrase is blasphemy and ushered
          • Don't hate the tool for being easy to use. Digital photography has a great deal of promise, and there are plenty of gifted photographers using such cameras... Give them a gigapixel camera and I'm sure they'll astound us.

            I agree, unfortunately, I have also seen a decline in the quality of photography from people we have worked with before in film. I give these peole more benefit of the doubt as, I know they can produce better work, I am just assuming that they are new to the digital medium. Still frustrat

            • Oh, you can see the difference between JPEG and non-JPEG alright, you're probably just looking at a bad example that masks the differences.

              The problems with JPEG are legion (though it's an amazingly cool format for preserving the sense of the image without nearly as much storage).

              For starters, JPEG drops a LOT of color information, which will usually result in images where subject matter that has very sharp color contrast (but not intensity) will be washed out. For example, take a picture of a jar of mult

    • Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

      Hold on there fella. This is slashdot. You can't have first post *and* be correct. :-P

      But seriously, what kind of pixel resolutions are generated by large format film? (Yes, film isn't pixels, I know). Is 8x10 format about as big as you would realistically use without building a custom camera? I know in the past people have done custom sizes.

      • Re:Large Format film cameras (Score:5, Informative)

        by vought ( 160908 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @04:47PM (#11046435)
        I've got mod points, but I'm going to contribute to this thread instead of modding. There's a lot of assumption about image quality based on numbers alone, and fortunately I worked and taught in a terrific digital studio for the past two years, so I want to set striaght a couple of things.

        4X5 inch film comprises an imageable area of about 19 square inches with a lens that covers this film adquately.

        19 square inches of high-resolution color film - Fuji Provia or Velvia (limiting myself to color for the sake of this discussion) will capture about 2400 dpi worth of useful image data at 8 bpp. The film can easily be scanned to higher resolutions and higher bit depths, but the main reason to do this on a high-end drum scanner is to avoid having to use software to interpolate the image for extremely large prints that exceed the resolution of the original scan.

        19 square inches * 2400dpi * 8bpp = just under 300MB.

        That's about 100 megapixels, give or take a few percentage points. Cost of film and developing per shot is about $3.50 for color, about $.80 for black and white.

        Scanning a 4X5 inch sheet of film costs about $80.00 at my favorite lab. (I use westcoastimaging.com, even though I'm down the street from Calypso Imaging in Santa Clara. WCI does an incredible job, and nearly everyone on staff is actually a photographer, or married to one.)

        Add $20.00 for FedEx back and forth from the lab, and you've got a 100 megapixel image with some slight imperfections (dust spots, chromatic aberration from some older lenses) for about $105.00 per exposure. At this point, the fun begins; the photographer can use Photoshop or the GIMP to make tonal and contrast changes, attempt to match the chrome, or get really fanciful.

        You could make a 16-bit scan of a photograph that contains super-subtle tonal gradation to ensure against banding in the final print, but since most digital photographic printers like the LightJet and Chromira only print 8-bit files, it's usually a moot point.

        Normally, lower-end scanners have to scan in 16-bit to eliminate noise and increase quality to a point where they can stand close to an 8-bit drum scan from a Tango.

        Without explaining the vagaries of scanning backs, it is possible to directly capture a 100MP image from a conventional 4X5 inch camera - but only if the subject isn't moving. Even the 40-year old shutter in my Schneider 90mm lens can work at 1/500 sec, given sufficient light for the film I have loaded. No "gagapixel" camera can do this yet - not even remotely.

        This whole "gigapixel" push is a scam. After making some 30X40 test prints from the Canon EOS1-D mkII the other day, I can say without question that digital cameras are pushing the boundries of medium format film while remaining under the 30 megapixel benchmark.

        The proof is in the print. In a world where most digital images are posted and viewed on web pages, no one will easily tell the difference between a 30k JPEG that started life as a high-resolution scan and one that started life in a .06MP Apple QuickTake from 1996. A print on paper at a equivalent resolution is the best wayo to test real image quality.

        In this case, megapixel comparisons are moot. Because the characteristics of film and digital are different, you can't accurately compare a scan from film and a digital file of the same size on screen alone.

        The most accurate way to determine the quality of an image is to look at a print. When they reach 30-40 megapixels, with forgettable battery life and no crashes, I may be tempted to give up my view camera for a DSLR, but some features still won't be there (full tilt/swing/shift movements, for one).

        For me, 20 pounds of view camera equipment (using exactly one battery, for my spot meter) is still (and may reamin for several years) the easiest way to capture high-resolution photographs in the field. That's what I like to do with my camera - if my goal was to get quick turnaround studio shots, then I'
        • Large-format cameras still make "high megapixel" images more quickly, easily, and cheaply than the interesting but ultimately misguided project cited in the article.


          Cool. Thanks for all the info. Sometimes I find it difficult to compare the apples and monkeys that get thrown around here. :-P

          Cheers

        • I'm a little confused by some of the aritmetic. It looks like you multipled 19 square inches by a linear 2400 dpi.

          Also, according to the New York Times piece on this guy, this first prototype is a very large format negative film camera, and the image is scanned from the negative on a drum scanner.

          Aside from that, I think people spend too much time worrying about resolution and not enough about bit depth. I forget the exact numbers, but B&W negative film has a contrast range of 10 or 11 orders of m

          • This is the same ILM that launched the OpenEXR initiative, right ?
            That digital image format which allows, among other, storage of data with a dynamic range that film can't even dream about capturing ?

            There's absolutely no particular need to 'compress' contrast (I suspect this means fitting the black and white point of the film in a 0.0 .. 1.0 range, applying a curve (log?) to the result, to make it pretty), as they could just take a clipping from the range caught on the film.
            In addition, CGI can be rendere

            • This is the same ILM that launched the OpenEXR initiative, right ? That digital image format which allows, among other, storage of data with a dynamic range that film can't even dream about capturing ?

              Yes, one of the points of this talk (about two years ago) was the need for OpenEXR and how they hoped all the CGI tool providers would jump on board. But, at the time, they were still resorting to compression because they couldn't use a wide dynamic range all the way through the process. I don't know abou

          • I'm a little confused by some of the aritmetic. It looks like you multipled 19 square inches by a linear 2400 dpi.

            He was referring to two seperate things. The area is only relevant in that it gives you an indication of what the file size will be. dpi or ppi (same thing dots or pixels, dot's is a carry over from screen printing) is the indicator of how much information is in a particular amount of space, and his 19 square inches is an attempt to give an idea of area, so the total number of pixels is 2400 (

        • Re:Large Format film cameras (Score:4, Insightful)

          by phoenix321 ( 734987 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @07:13PM (#11047582)
          Photographers using traditional film have argued exactly the same for almost five years now and digital photography took off anyway.

          Digital technology becomes cheaper every month, no matter what piece of equipment we're talking about - except digicams just before xmas of course - so at one point we might have gigapixel cameras in the consumer price range, who knows.

          I must apologize for washing your detailed and insightful post away, but I think you have a narrow viewpoint from an elitist photographer's perspective. An incredibly old-school one at that, sorry to be so blunt. Analog cameras have intrinsic drawbacks that cannot be overcome and which are the reason for the digicam craze. I agree to you that digital photography is not the most efficient and not the cheapest way to do hoch resolution imaging at the moment. But Moore's Law will ensure it is in the future.

          Advantages of a high-resolution digital imaging system, from an outsider's viewpoint not married to celluloid and chemicals:

          - digital images can be previewed extremely fast. If a shot was wrong, retry without waste.
          - digital images can be sent via networks around the globe extremely fast. Newscasts, distributed expert teams, peer review, you name it.
          - digital images can be ported to any viewing equipment, instantly. Cinema-like projection equipment, large scale video walls, large printers, details on small handouts and laptop screens
          - archival without color degradation
          - catalogues are generated in an instant
          - easy whitebalance, even after the shooting
          - automatic recording of timestamps and used equipment, shutter times etc.

          Sorry for bringing up the "dinosaur"-argument, but sooner or later analog photography will die and there's nothing you can do about it. For consumer cameras, analog's nearly dead and photo studios are following now, leading digital photos slowly but steadily up the quality/picture size ladder. You are not alone, as there are many audiophile vinyl and radio tube enthusiasts out there, that simply refuse to acknowlegde digital technology and its advantages.

          To mimic your "sum up":

          -Large-format cameras may be easier and cheaper, but prone to human error, slower and horribly unflexible in image presentation.
          -A print may be the best way to judge image quality, but in case of a 10x10m image, it can take you days if not weeks to get it on paper.

          A projected or backlighted image certainly is a thousand times more enticing and "real" to the viewer's eyes. Paper images are lacking vivid colors and real appearance in my opinion and there's no studio light full-spectrum or bright enough to concinve me otherwise. A paper photograph may induce different emotions or a more distand point of view, that's why black&white imaging is so intense - but paper is no accurate representation of reality and it's going the way of portrait oil painting soon, I think. More artsy, less real. Real viewing is luminous, paper is not.
          • Photographers using traditional film have argued exactly the same for almost five years now and digital photography took off anyway.

            Yes, digital has mostly replaced 35mm (for color anyways) and is encroaching on medium format. However I am skeptical that Moore's law applies to CCD and CMOS photo sensors. The low-hanging fruit has been grabbed and the higher megapixel sensors, coming to the prosumer market today, are quite noisy in order to get 7 or 8 megapixels. Plus I think you will see a point when s
        • Great post, thankyou. You make we want to go out and work on my (humble) nature photography.

          If I liked to geek out instead of making pictures of the rapidly degrading and disappearing wildlands of the United States, I'd probably be all for this ridiculous gigapixel project.

          Right, but beautiful pictures are offtopic for Slashdot. None of the artists doing beautiful work get mentioned here.
        • 2400 dots per square inch? Umm, I think you may need to clarify the math real quick...

          4x5 inches, at 2400 dots per inch is 9600*12,000 pixels
          That's about 115 million pixels. 8 bits per channel, three channel RGB gets us about 345 MB.

          The OP's math is oddly phrazed, and it made me do a double take, but it checks out.

    • Re:Large Format film cameras (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Cecil ( 37810 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @04:00PM (#11046029) Homepage
      Why? 8x10 cameras have existed for 100 years. Using modern film and a drum scanner will create a digital image with more than 1Gb of pixel data.

      That's like saying why bother creating better compression formats when you can already compress a 4 minute sound file to (hypothetical) under a meg at 128kbps quality by encoding it to mp3 128kbps first, then to wma 128kbps. You're doing one lossy conversion, light to film, then a very different type of lossy conversion, scanning film to digital. Sure, it works pretty well in practice, but it's far from optimal.

      And many photographers obsess over making things optimal. It's why they buy $3,000+ lenses. And not just one, either.

      Anyway, the answer for "why" seems pretty obvious to me, at least.
      • Sure, it works pretty well in practice, but it's far from optimal.

        It's a real shame that it only works in practice. Because working in practice doesn't matter at all it has to work in theory. (Incidentally, this actually does work in theory, too.)

        Also, your analogy is seriously flawed. It's much more like taking a record (a record with few flaws that runs at a very low speed) and encoding that to an audio format somewhere in the neighborhood of twice the quality of a CD.

        The record player you do t
    • Large format film sounds nice but u run into problems like increased chromatic abberation (bigger lens), processing defects, and of course analog to digital conversion losses.

      What annoys me is that most people believe a film camera is nothing like digital cameras. Yes, digital cameras have no "film" but really, what do u think film is, that makes it so magical. There are grains on the film as well as grains on the photographic paper responsible for capturing incoming light just as a ccd or cmos sensor woul
    • Kind of hard to do it remotely. With an 802.11b or you can send the pictures miles. Ideal for say remote images from a telescope or Mount Saint Helen.
      Besides distance you have time limitations if you want the image right now. You have to develop and scan the image. Kind of related to the that remote issue as well I mean you can always go and grab the image later.
      Costs are is also an issue. I head some one say the cost of the picture plus scanning was around $100.
      The cost for storage of of digital images are

  • Why artists? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:14PM (#11045502) Homepage
    Sounds like a technical question to me and the last thing you want when solving technical problems is an artist saying 'well yes, that's all very nice, but we think it should be pink'.
    • your comment and your sig are a funny combination

    • Re:Why artists? (Score:3, Informative)

      by BWJones ( 18351 ) *
      This is very much like a conversation I just had in another discussion group. The issue is that you have certain optical properties of your eye. Namely starting with the density of photoreceptors which are about 10^5 per square mm. You then have to deal with an imaging surface (the retina) at 2.5 cm from the lens revealing an object of 1mm at 25 cm which gets projected to a size of about 0.1mm onto the back of the retina. If one assumes approximately 320 photoreceptors/mm (averaged over the eye), given
      • Play with the numbers all you want. Then, go print a document at 100 dpi vs 600 or 1200 dpi, and tell me they look the same.

        If they do, go make an appointment with your eye doctor.
        • Play with the numbers all you want. Then, go print a document at 100 dpi vs 600 or 1200 dpi, and tell me they look the same.

          Did you actually read what I wrote? Read it again and think about it and you might find that what you are currently thinking is supported by my statement.

          If they do, go make an appointment with your eye doctor.

          Ummmmm. That would be me. :-)

    • 2 reasons: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by temojen ( 678985 )
      • Photographic artists tend to be highly technical.
      • If you're going to have to hand develop an 8x10 photographic plate, then scan it on a unique, hand built drum scanner and post-process it on a supercomputer, the first question should be is this scene worth 4gigapixels?, and the second question should be is the lighting right?
      • If you're going to have to hand develop an 8x10 photographic plate, then scan it on a unique, hand built drum scanner and post-process it on a supercomputer, the first question should be is this scene worth 4gigapixels?

        Probably not, based on your interpretation. But since suitable drum scanners are available off the shelf, and a "supercomputer" is not needed, just a particularly strong workstation, you question is not valid.

        • Re:2 reasons: (Score:4, Interesting)

          by temojen ( 678985 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:57PM (#11045994) Journal

          Wait... you know of a "particularly strong" workstation that can interactively manipulate a 190Gb image? (4G * 48b)

          Storing one copy is one thing... storing multiple working copies and interactively working on them is another thing entirely.

          • 190Gb in a single image is challenging even for 'consumer' filesystems.

            But anyway, the trick is not to load a 190Gb file into memory. You load a small chunk of it.

            And if the chunk is small enough, you can certainly load/unload chunks as you go in order to get interactive performance.

            The only time the entire image would be affected is if you are affecting the entire image - e.g. brightening the whole thing or somesuch.

            If you're just zooming/panning, however, no need to address the entire image.

            And yes,
          • Not quite a workstation, but certainly not a supercomputer: an rx8620 [hp.com] can comfortably hold that in memory and kick it around fairly quickly. There are users (defense, oil/gas) who need to deal interactively with many-gigabyte datasets. I don't know if anyone would want a single bitmap of that size though.
      • Nitpick:

        8X10 inch images are virtually always captured on film (polyester base) rather than glass plates. Today's film and film holders have good enough dimensional stability, and glass plates aren't needed to retain consistent focus across the entire image anymore.

        Glass plates would be a little tough to mount on a drum scanner. I'm thinking some extreme heat would have to be involved.

    • Re:Why artists? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 )

      Sounds like a technical question to me and the last thing you want when solving technical problems is an artist saying 'well yes, that's all very nice, but we think it should be pink'.

      No no no. You're confusing marketing with artists.

      Artists recognize there needs to be a practical way to make it pink, and can actually listen when you say "God, imagine trying to use a 10-foot wide brush".

      The artists want it pink for a reason and are willing to discuss how to make it go.

      All marketing knows is that a cu

  • It's been done, albeit with some manual steps (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seanscottrogers ( 565312 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:15PM (#11045512)
    Check out the grand canyon in gigapixel glory [tawbaware.com]

  • Enough resolution, not enough depth (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The human eye can only resolve the equivalent of a couple megapixels, so the lack of "you are there" is not really a fault of image resolution. It's the lack of real depth that is missing from fotos. Stereo photography is a step forward, but it doesn't allow for natural focus changes and good (high res) stereo vision systems are far too expensive.

  • Something like these? (Score:5, Informative)

    by TroZ ( 160902 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:17PM (#11045544)
    How About a Gigapixel Digital Camera? http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/1 0/1356212&tid=160 [slashdot.org]
    Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/02/202720 7&tid=152 [slashdot.org]
    Gigapxl Project http://www.gigapxl.org/project.htm [gigapxl.org]

  • Astronomy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Big Yak ( 441903 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:17PM (#11045545) Homepage
    Other than recreational uses, what else could this be used for? Telescope cameras pop to mind for space imagery capture. I think current systems use very high-resolution cameras, though anything that drives down prices would drive up quality.

    Has someone applied Moore's law to digital camera pixel amount?
    • Moore's law may not apply.

      See visible light (which is I'm assuming what you plan to take pictures of) have a fixed frequency and wavelength. An image sensor (let's say CMOS, since CCD seems it will be overtaken) is a basically photo-diode.

      So you have some diode region on your chip that is being hit with photons. They penetrate the surface a certain distance down vertically, depending on their energy (IR, blue, red, etc.). One factor is that as the geometries shrink, the electrons are generated some
    • If you're talking about lots and lots of megapixels per exposure, that's pointless for astronomy. There are fixed physical limitations in play. Film and CCDs in the 6 to 10 megapixel range are already imaging all the detail that you can capture in a managable sized aperture. There just isn't detail smaller than that, both because of dawe's limit on arcseconds of detail available per inch of aperture, but also because of atmospheric interference.

      If you're talking about creating very large images from mos

  • 3D (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alan_dershowitz ( 586542 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:18PM (#11045551)
    I have personally found even lower-resolution 3D pictures to look much nicer than high-res 2D pictures. Combine something like this with stereoscopic glasses and it would be like "being there". I wonder if Mr. Ross has considered this.
    • Yes, I believe this is the real key to more realistic images. Giving people a dead easy and convenient way to view the images is probably what's holding the idea back.

  • Ross says his goal is to bring closer to reality his desire to create a "you are there" photographic experience for those who have not personally witnessed the sublime beauty of natural scenes such as Mt. Sopris in Colorado."

    I hope he doesn't forget the gentle breeze. A small fan should work nicely.

  • Another Gigapixel camera (Score:3, Informative)

    by saccade.com ( 771661 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:19PM (#11045567) Homepage Journal
    Check out Gigapxl.org [gigapxl.org]. The guy creating the cameras for this project is a serious optical genious.

    • Re:Another Gigapixel camera (Score:4, Interesting)

      by chmilar ( 211243 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @04:07PM (#11046096)
      Yes. This project is superior to the so-called "Dream Team".

      The Gigapxl team have taken a far more scientific and rigorous approach than Ross.

      For example, they have:

      • designed their own custom lens to meet their resolution requirements.
      • measured the exact performance of their film.
      • accounted for atmospheric limitations to light propagation.
      • ensured the exact alignment of the lens and film.
      • used laser rangefinders to set accurate focus.

      Both Gigapxl and Ross are using converted 9x18" aerial photography cameras, with vacuum backs, but Gigapxl has taken steps to ensure the maximum performance of their equipment. Ross has not.

      And, as far as size goes, there are photographers using cameras up to 20x24 [wisner.com].

      The "dream team" is really just the "hype team".


  • they are going to measure the size of that new CCD sensor in that new camera and discover that it is exactly 42 mm square.

  • I for one am very excited about the future of graphics. Many people seem to be thrilled with the ever-widening use and availability of HD tv. And with some measure, I am too. However, there are many more things to do with displays that would truely expand their usefulness in both the realm of quality and quantity.
    "Really there" video displays would make for some interesting experiences and shots from locations uninhabitable. Flat displays have plenty of room to expand into the markets of paper (you didn't t

  • zerg (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:24PM (#11045635) Homepage
    Maybe a few more details over @ the boingboing coverage of story [boingboing.net]...
  • Is anyone else tired of the use of "Dream Team?" My first thought was the 1990 (or was it 1992?) US Mens basketball team in lab coats scratching their heads. Or maybe OJ's defense team. It just seems that the phrase "Dream Team" jumped the shark a long time ago and really needs to be retired.
  • Uhh, excuse me if i'm being rude but....

    Isn't that 'you are there' feeling attributed to actually BEING THERE, the smell, the sound, everything.. not just the view...

    I don't think the absolute beauty of a location/person/anything can be captured with any device conceived yet...

    yet...

  • Sublime screenshot of Mt. Sopris (Score:5, Funny)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:27PM (#11045662) Homepage Journal
    as taken from Gpx imaging system:

    /\
    /\/ \/\

  • 2.5 gigapixel photo (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mscdex ( 774392 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:31PM (#11045716)
    I still think the 2.5 gigapixel photo is the best. The detail is incredible, the photo is interactive, allowing zoom capability. You can zoom all the way in and read license plates and see parking passes. http://www.tpd.tno.nl/smartsite966.html [tpd.tno.nl]

  • Pixel count is not the only important thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rolman ( 120909 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:31PM (#11045722)
    There are several techniques that could be used to achieve such pixel count with current technology, so it doesn't really sound that interesting. It might be good to create a large, hi-res poster with a beautiful landscape. It's also nice that they want the massive datasets to be processed and stored in about 1/15th of a second, making it a lot more useable for artistic purposes.

    But film still surpasses those qualities and not only because of resolution and speed, but color. What I'd be interested in is to have digital photography that goes beyond the current 24-bit depth (if only for internal computations and not actual output) and implements better CCD technology to compensate for its inherent problems with lighting.

    I know there are advances in those areas, but unfortunately they've been very slow since the market is going for pixel count (MHz, anyone?). Until that trend changes, film will continue to be the better choice, regardless of what any dream team says.
    • Ummm... most prosumer and pro digital cameras, if not all, are higher than 8-bits per channel.

      A $600 Canon Digital Rebel is 12-bit internally, and the RAW files are 12-bit. The camera takes each gray-scale 12-bit sample, knows what color filter its sitting behind and interpolates the color image (as a 36-bit color space) accordingly when you save as a JPG internally, but when you use RAW, the software on the computer gets the full 12-bit values. That 50% more information makes a huge difference when you ha
    • Set your camera to "raw" mode. Then decode the images with "dcraw -4", and edit them with CinePaint or Photoshop Pro. Poof, you have 12-16 bit/colour images (depending on your camera).

  • how much your eye can see? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by u19925 ( 613350 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:33PM (#11045740)
    given eye's optics, you can resolve about 1.5 mega pixels. This is assuming that the picture is kept at a distance, so that it occupies about the same area as 50 mm lens would provide on 35 mm camera (or 3x2 feet picture kept at 5 ft away). This is theoretical limit based on perfect print. Since most photos have some artifacts, you reach saturation at a slightly higher pixel count.

    If your monitor is more than 1600x1200 and if you want to do pixel by pixel comparison of two photos on a single monitor (each photo size 800x600), then it is not possible to do so without moving your head.

    In order to see 1 giga pixel, you will have to be incredibly close to the photo compared to its size and also will have to move up/down/side to see the details at different places.

    Higher magapixel beyond 4-6 MP is only good for cropping, zooming, scientific data etc but is not of much use as a single print, specially if it is to be viewed as a whole.
    • Vision isn't just optics. It's also brain mechanisms of perception. The eye doesn't just sit there looking straight ahead, it is constantly in motion, moving the fovea (the center of the retina with the highest density of receptors) past areas of interest, sweeping across the image and scrutinizing small areas of detail.
  • Increased resolution would be nice, as would stereo photos. But I wonder if one thing that might help photos seem more real is to have them backlit in a realistic way. Look at a sunset in real life, then look at a photo. It's not the same, and I suspect that part of the reason is that the amount of light pouring into your eyes and spilling into the surrounding colors is very different than looking at dots of pigment, however fine. It may be that the best photographs may be produced on digital paper, where w

  • Composition vs. Recording (Score:5, Interesting)

    by podperson ( 592944 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @03:42PM (#11045836) Homepage
    One of the interesting possibilities for cameras with that much resolution is that photography can become a question of choosing a view of a larger recorded image rather than simply recording that cropped view.

    This way you can crop your photos OUTWARDS and not just INWARDS after the fact.

    This of course has all kinds of privacy implications too (why shouldn't the photograph be an all round view that includes the photographer?)
    • Of course you can already compose the image so that whatever is of interest is in view. And when in doubt: don't zoom in.

      As for the photographer in the view - well, because > 180 degree fisheye lenses cost a bundle.
      However, there's panoramic reflectors that allow this.
      And, in fact, there's a popular thing done by CG artists for a year of 2 where they take a picture of a mirror-surface ball (ballbearings work nicely), and then use a panoramic image editor/processor (such as HDRshop) to change that image
  • OK, a quick look here for some hard numbers: Count and density of human retinal photoreceptors. [nih.gov]

    Shows only about 60 Million net receptors (rods+cones) in the human eye. Only 1/20 is for color, and almost none are for blue. So unless it's gonna be printed on the side of a building (which you view from far away) you only need a few megapixels for your little 4x5" prints.

    Of course, that wont stop anyone...
    • Yah, and if you had actually read the article (or paid attention to it) you would have noticed that the intent is to re-create grand scenes like a mountain in a "you are there" fashion. That's obviously not a dinky 4x5 print, but more like an entire billboard or something like a photographic Imax with a curved screen.
  • Attached is a submission I recently sent in that was rejected, but seems pertinent here.

    Slashdot has previousely written about Max Lyons' Gigapixel Grand Canyon [slashdot.org] and also TNO's 2.5 Gigapixel office park [slashdot.org] which were both generated by taking many digital images and stiching them togather. Film is not quite dead though, as the Gigapxl Project [gigapxl.org] is using a customized 9"x18" film camera - read more in their FAQ [gigapxl.org] and how they have to worry about issues such as atmospheric transmission. [gigapxl.org] They have an impressive ima [gigapxl.org]

  • for black during a new moon at around 2AM. It's those "day folk" that need all those pixels. Mt. Sopris pic [johnfielder.com]

  • ...and his technique/technology was suspiciously absent from the article (which spent a great deal of time talking about his past artistic background). Might have something to do with his private meeting with Sandia people about his technology.

    Does anyone know what he's doing that's really any different from using a traditional 8x10 and some slow-speed, fine-grained film?

    The article's brief description of the camera mentioned mirrors and the very wide depth of field of his photos (objects in sharp focus
    • There was an article about him and his camera in the most recent Esquire magazine. He built the camera himself by modifying an WWII-era extra-large format camera that was used from spy planes and made incredibly detailed images in its day. He's an artist, not an engineer, which is interesting.

  • Another idea that will go nowhere (Score:3, Funny)

    by spidergoat2 ( 715962 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @04:01PM (#11046038) Journal
    ...until the porn industry co-opts it.
  • That sure blows my Photoshop memory budget out of the water for this year. Although I believe my current version can only handle a maximum of 900MP (300,000 x 300,000).
    • 300,000 * 300,000 = 90,000,000,000

      Yes, that's right - 90 gigapixels

      Of course that's just the theoretical top canvas size. I'd like to see you do anything in Photoshop that large with the current memory limits the way they are. The largest file's I've worked on in PS CS are panoramas around 70,000 x 15,000 or thereabouts, and boy that was fun (considering the 10 or 12 layers I had, plus adjustment layers). Reminds me of the old days!
      • I'd like to see you do anything in Photoshop that large with the current memory limits the way they are.

        Obviously we need a 64-bit Photoshop to go with the IBM, AMD, or Intel 32/64-bit processors. 64-bit Photoshop would definitely be the single most compelling reason to upgrade to the next version.

  • How about just 1000 frames of 1Kx1K pixels, for a 30 second video? That's over a gigapixel. A picture's worth a thousand words, but a movie's worth a thousand pictures.
  • This was covered in the Technology section of today's New York Times (here [nytimes.com]).

    Before you start flaming the guy about "gigapixels", understand that Clifford Ross has built a film camera that records astonishing amounts of detail, including the Mt. Sopris picture. He's an artist, but also has done innovative things with optics and film.

    Also, you gotta like a guy who owns the IP rights to both Tom Swift and Babar the elephant!

  • Gigapixel might sound cool, but there are very few real applications and a lot of downside to Gigapixel images.

    First of all consider that only 4 of the bastards will fit on a DVD. For 6 megapixel uncompressed raw you could hold 750 pictures. Better yet you can hold 4500 pictures compressed down to 1Mb each. Storage costs money. If you want them to be convenient you're going to want to keep them on a hard disk (which costs significantly more than DVD per gig).

    Next consider that manipulating the pictures w
  • The Kepler planetary telescope has a 100 megapixel camera [nasa.gov]. I heard it might be triple before launch next year.

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