There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.
But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.
More Pixels
When it comes to building a consumer camera with higher resolution, manufacturers achieve this by creating an image sensor with a greater number of sensing elements. This, of course, can get expensive and difficult the farther you want to scale, particularly if you’re trying to fit more sensing elements into a given standard sensor size.
A scanner sensor has great linear resolution. Pan one behind a high-quality lens, and you can capture images in super high resolution… just hope that nothing moves while you’re capturing a shot!
