[LargeFormat] Latest Camera Technology

[Schuyler Grace]

I was watching The Science Channel's "Discoveries This Week" program this
morning, and they had a segment on the "latest" in camera technology.  It
seems one of the people who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, and who's
now retired,  has designed a completely new, digital camera with a
resolution of 3.1 Gigapixels, which (according to the reporter and the
designer) is an astounding level of resolution, never before attainable.
They even showed how much detail the camera captured by progressively
blowing up shots and picking out very minute pieces of the image.

But all the while, I was thinking, "that's pretty good, but I'd think you
could get something close to that, if not better, with a good old LF
camera."

Well, it turns out this very industrial looking device--it's big hunks of
metal, with dial indicators all over the thing and a serious roller cart to
move it around--is actually a LF roll film camera (what looked like a car
window crank is used to move the film through).  Judging from the film
handling mechanism, the film is about 18" to 24" wide, and I couldn't tell
how they focused it (didn't see a ground glass, viewfinder, or video link),
unless they were using the dial indicators for that.  It also appeared to
have a fairly short lens for that film size.

What made it a "digital" camera was that they were using the film as a
"buffer" to capture the image (their words)--direct digital capture would be
too slow--and then scanning the film to create the digital image.  Wow!
Whoever would have thunk it was possible?

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

-Schuyler