Engineers develop gigapixel camera

International Business Times writes.

In a paper appearing in the journal Nature, on Wednesday, the team describes their AWARE-2 camera, which can potentially capture up to 50 gigapixels of data - or 50 000 megapixels. That is a huge leap ahead of most digital cameras on the general market that take photographs between 8MP and 40MP in size.

According to LA Times, the new device is actually made up of 98 small cameras that surround a common lens, which gathers light and sends it to the cameras. Each of the 98 cameras captures a small part of the device's field of view and a specially designed computer processor stitches the images together.

The resulting image has far more detail than the human eye can handle.

However, photographers using the camera can zoom in on different parts of the images in great detail, essentially allowing a single image to become many detailed photographs, according to the researchers.

The camera described in the Nature paper takes only black-and-white pictures, The Wall Street Journal reports.

David Brady, an optical engineer at Duke who led the team that designed the one-gigapixel camera, said his team will finish building a 10-gigapixel colour version by year-end and will then construct a 50-gigapixel device.

The team hopes to begin manufacturing industrial-type gigapixel cameras on a limited basis in 2013. But scientists estimate it would take at least several years before a handheld, consumer version of the technology becomes available.