A couple years ago, Hasselblad released a 200-megapixel, Multi-Shot version of its H5D medium format camera. Now it's back with a bonkers, 400-megapixel version of the H6D: the H6D-400c.
Hasselblad's Multi-Shot technology is pretty straightforward: it takes four 100-megapixel images, shifting the sensor by one pixel for each capture, and then two more shots that shift the sensor by half a pixel. By combining all six stills, the resulting file is a single 400-megapixel (23200 x 17400 pixel) 16-bit TIFF file that weighs in at 2.4GB. In fact, the images are large enough that the camera needs to be tethered to a computer to capture them.
[...] The camera will go for $47,995 when it launches in March, compared to the H6D-100c's relatively modest $27,000 price tag.
Story at The Verge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:31PM (4 children)
The flash memory required to store >50 images fits on a removable chip smaller than your pinky fingernail, an internal drive that stores hundreds fits on a M.2 stick. The RAM required to buffer a dozen finished images is an ordinary notebook PC stick thats cost a tiny fraction of what this camera sells for.
They're tethering it to a computer by design choice (probably hanging on to legacy bits), the components required to make it untethered are cheap, lightweight, commodity parts.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:05PM (2 children)
They're tethering it by need:
You need a piezo stage driver and controller coordinated with the frame capture. I suppose you could build all of that into the camera body, but you'd probably want a hand truck to move it around with you.
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:15PM
They're generating 2.4GB images. To deal with them internally reasonably fast, they'd have to buffer the data to RAM, while in parallel writing it to FLASH. So, they'd need a storage subsystem consisting of a microprocessor, 2.4GB of RAM, and a USB/SD/CF interface. Hate to tell you, but that's a package that fits in an area of less than 1 sq in and a couple of millimeters thick these days. The specs aren't that different from the processing complex in a modern cell phone. There'd be no need for a hand truck.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Kromagv0 on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:23PM
All of that equipment is built into cameras that are already available and even a bunch that don't cost more than my car. While there was the previous 200MP camera from Hasselblad, there are others you can buy now that aren't even a flagship camera. I would suggest looking at the Pentax K-1 (flagship DSLR), K-3II, KP, and K-70(entry level DSLR) as they all do pixel shift. However they don't do it to increase the resolution but instead as a method to eliminate the demosaicing process [wikipedia.org] normally needed when working with a sensor wit a bayer pattern so that each pixel has a real RGB set of readings instead of interpolated. The added color depth as well as higher clarity on edges from the Pentax cameras makes up for the lack of increase in resolution in the images I have seen but if one wanted to they could just do demosaicing on the pixel shifted Pentax image afterwards and get a similar increase in resolution likely with better results as you would likely have access to better algorithms that don't need to meet an embedded system's power and time budget.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 4, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:45PM
In the actual spec sheet [hasselblad.com] it states that the camera supports:
The tethering option has been common on high end professional DSLRs and digital medium formats for a long time as computer disk space is much cheaper than that more portable CF, or SD card storage. Also by tethering you can offload processing to the computer instead of doing it in camera. I would bet the camera does have internal buffering probably for several images. I have a previous gen flagship DSLR camera and when I put it in burst mode it will take 27 or 28 raw pictures at just over 8 FPS until it fills the buffer and then it slows down, so I would think that this camera also being a flagship medium format would have some reasonable buffer as well but I don't see any info on that. I am somewhat surprise it only supports UHS-1 and not UHS-1 and UHS-2 but most who use this camera will likely be using CFast cards (non studio) or have it tethered (studio) anyway.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone