Hasselblad’s Kodak CCD-equipped H3DII-50 Offers 50 Megapixels

No matter the technology, people enjoy seeing higher numbers. Faster processors, more memory, more horsepower and of course, more megapixels. The company to reign supreme in that arena for a while has been Hasselblad, who are now offering the H3DII-50, a 50 megapixel monster, utilizing Kodak’s latest highest-end 36.8×49.1mm sensor.

The camera’s price is not yet known, but considering the ‘smaller’ H3DII-39 retails for just under $34,000, then you could expect the latest iteration to score upwards of $40,000. But what kind of resolution avails you with a 50 megapixel CCD? How does 6132×8176 sound? As incredible as that may appear, it sure doesn’t seem that much more impressive over the 39 megapixels 5412×7212. But as simple math will prove, the higher we go in megapixels, the slower the overall resolution will increase to our eye.

But still, 50,000,000 pixels from a single image is simply incredible. To put it into perspective, a 1680×1050 monitor comes close to 1.8 million pixels, while the current monster, 2560×1600, sits at a comfortable 4.2 million pixels. That’s not the most impressive part, though. Each image taken with the H3DII-50 will weigh in at around 70MB a piece. Not only is the camera itself expensive, but the computer you’d need to handle the images would also have to be.

To fit more pixels on the same chip, Kodak had to perform some voodoo shrinkage on them; they’re 6 microns, compared with 6.8 for the KAF-39000. Kodak claims that the chip has increased data throughput, which seems odd since the specs (which are admittedly stamped “preliminary”) indicate a maximum throughput of 18MHz vs. 24MHz for the 39-megapixel CCD.

Source: C|Net Crave