----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Maxey" If you Google "Giga Pixel" (try saying that three times) you will find a number of links. One bothersome story often reported is "the GigaPixel Project." The problem is, the camera is old tech and uses 9 x 18 inch aerial film -or plates; and a Russian spy camera; or camera backs, depending on the web site you visit to read the story. It is not a purely digital system, so in my view, the project is misnamed and misleading. The person(s) behind the GigaPixel project also uses a Leitz GeoScanner, quite costly. ..just to once again put things in perspective - the Gigapixel project is as digital as any 'digital' camera on the market in that the scanner converts an analogue image grabbed by analogue sensors and digitises the result - just as a 'digital' camera is a monochrome analogue device that digitises the image grab and through software converts the results. both a digital camera and a film camera are *analogue* cameras, the 'digital' camera just has a AD converter onboard to save the images in a digital format. interestingly a 10x10 inch image at 4000 dpi saved as a TIF is 4.5gb in size. Thats roughly 222 images to a 1 terabyte hard drive, in my local currency that's about $5 a shot in storage. I could only guess what a *digital* camera that could produce such comparable size images would cost, and the computer/software to handle such things..! fortunately my biggest is only an 8x10, and analogue image handling in a wet process system is pretty quick at any size ;-) k
