On Cameras and Pixels

In 1975, the first digital camera took 23 seconds to capture its first image, recording it to a cassette tape.  The camera weighed it at eight pounds and produced a black and white picture with a resolution of whopping 10,000 pixels (0.01 megapixels).

15 years later, the Logitech FotoMan became the first digital camera sold to consumers.  It was pretty sleek, and boasted a 30x increase in resolution from the digital prototype – around 300,000 pixels!  That’s a lot, right?  Think again…that’s 0.3 megapixels.

In 2010, my sister Mary (see her photography blog here) got a pretty basic consumer model digital camera, and the pictures she takes are about 8 megapixels.  That’s 26 times sharper than than 1990’s FotoMan.

Imagine where cameras will be in another 15 years.  Extrapolating from my (tiny) data set, we should be seeing resolutions in the range of 240 megapixels by 2025.  Think that’s crazy?  There are already (rather large) handheld 160 megapixel cameras out there.  They are for specialized applications and cost around 40 grand.  Based on the history of the camera, I’d have to say I think they’ll be gettin’ smaller!

These massive resolutions make me realize just how “sharp” our world is and how clear a picture real life has.  Here’s an interesting thought though – will cameras get to the point where they are too clear for real life?  What if a pixel was able to capture a tiny point in space where atoms from one surface are whirling close to atoms from another surface, and there is a tiny tiny bit of natural “blurr.”  Or maybe the world is infinitely defined, infinitely clear, and the more cameras develop the more we will be able to see the true state of the world.