Saturday, May 24, 2008 11:34 PM
by
stevecla01
Microsoft makes a 216megapixel camera
I just learnt this from Mark Brown's Virtual Earth Blog. It turns out the cameras we use for Virtual Earth 3D models known as the UltraCam are manufactured by Microsoft. Get your head around this Engadget
216 mega-pixels with a panchromatic image size of 14,430 x 9,420 pixels, capturing data at over 3 GBits/sec, 13 CCD's - 7 pan and 4 color (RGB + Near IR) and 14 CPU's to process the raw images and data in real-time. The data units for the camera hold 1.7TB, enough for about 4,700 images. Since they are swappable the only limitation to how much imagery you can collect is how big your aircraft is to hold these units.
You can get the full tech specs online at the Ultracam site and like Mark, I’m going to add one to my Christmas list and then see if I can borrow a friends jet for a day or two :) I didn’t see a BUY NOW button on that site though. Hmmm.
