Haven't you ever dreamt of a perfect camera, turning your photos into more perfect memories?! Although it's not an IT product, the Super Camera can be a reliable gadget for work and leisure. The Super Camera is in fact experimental camera with more than 30 times the data-collecting capacity of today's best consumer digital devices, developed by scientists at Duke University in North Carolina. This development could fundamentally alter the way images are captured and viewed, but let's get closer and see what's wonderful about Super Camera.
Super Camera Is Reality
Technically speaking, Super Camera is an ultimate product, as its name indicates. While today's best digital cameras take images having using millions of pixels, the latest device produces or video image with billions of pixels, which is five times more detailed than the average.
The experimental Duke device, known as AWARE-2, is a long way from being a commercial product, still it's a beginning. The current version needs lots of space to be housed and to cool its electronic boards; it weighs 100 pounds and is about the size of two microwave ovens put together. It also takes about 18 seconds to shoot a frame and record the data on a disk, which is as fast as a smartphone.
Super Camera Is Reality
From my point of view, this gadget will be an alternative to current photography. Instead of deciding where to focus a camera, an user would simply shoot a scene, then zoom into any part of the picture and view it in extraordinary detail. David Brady, optical engineer at Duke University, who led the scientific team said that when they used the device to take a photograph of the Seattle skyline, they were able to zoom in and read the in and out signs written on a parking garage located a half-mile away. Similarly, if the camera were used to take video images of a tennis match, the viewer could zoom in on a player.
Super Camera Is Reality
Details of the Duke camera were published Nature, a prestigious research journal Nature. The $25 million project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense. No doubt that the military is interested in high-resolution cameras as tools for specific surveillance, but I bet manufacturers as HTC and Samsung have already spotted the innovation, it will certainly make fortunes, when it will be released for general purpose.
The secret of the Duke gadget is a spherical lens, able to accurately obtain focus images, somehow similar to human eye. The camera described in the Nature journal only takes black-and-white pictures. Dr. Brady said his team will finish building a 10-gigapixel color version by year-end and will then start constructing a 50-gigapixel device.
Source: Wall Street Journal
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