--- Frank Nichols <frank@theNichols.net> wrote:
> Based on the advances in RAM technology over the
> past 10 years I am
> predicting a 1Giga Pixel camera in the not too
> distant future (5 years or
> less). The significance of this camera will be a
> drastic reduction is the
> required size of lenses by using software digital
> zooming - this will be
> driven by your complaint and the relative expsense
> of these heavy long
> lenses of today.Note that ten years ago a couple of
> meg of ram was expensive
> and "huge" - today I have 1 GB of ram in my PC and
> it cost me $200 ($US).
Assuming that density for memory increases by a factor
of 2 every 18 months you will have less then
2*2*2*2=16 times more in 5 years. Assuming that CMOS
sensors scale at the same rate we will have
16MPixel*16=256MPixel in 6 years. That is considerable
less then 1 GPixel and is still on the high side. Even
if it would be possible to get 1 GPixel I still don't
think we would have get it. The problem is that the
more pixels you squeeze in the same area the smaller
the size of the pixel gets. Kind of like getting an
extremly slow film. So in order to get a usable output
you would need very long exposure times. If you don't
then your SNR (Signal-to-Noise-Ratio) will be very low
resulting in bad images. That is even more true if you
want to decrease the size of the imager. But that's
not all. With such high resolution the requirement for
lenses will be extremly high. If you really want to
take avantage of a GPixel imager whose size is fairly
small then you will need lenses with huge lpmm. For
all these reasons and many more I do not believe we
will get 1 GPixel in 5 years or less.
Robert
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