Sony engineers want to make digital photography as fast as video recording.
Right now, some digital cameras can take 60 frames per second, but at low resolutions, like 640x480 or less. That's good enough for moving video footage, but looks coarse for prints. Old-timers remember the early days of digital cameras, when the std resolution was 640x480 and return rates to stores were 50% or more.
What Sony hopes to achieve is to make digital camera chips fast enough that every camera takes photos at video speeds. That means 30 high-resolution photos per second and a heck of a lot of storage. The idea is that you leave the camera running, like a video camera, and then later extract the best shots.
The camera will have to be hooked up to a hard drive. Assume 400KB per picture:
30 frames per second = 12MB per second.
= 720MB per minute
= 43GB per hour
That last bit -- extracting the best shots -- I wonder about. Today, everybody keeps all their digital pictures, "just in case." Trying to distinquish between two or more photos taken 0.033 seconds apart...
...perhaps by then Google will have Picasa chosing the best photos for us.
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