Tom Swift's new camera, ready for space and spies

Clifford Ross has invented a camera whose negatives can hold 100 times as much data as the average professional digital device.
The New York Times
Photo: Homemade camera outdoes digital

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[Razzl]

sorry, it's way old news

Kudos to Clifford for garnering all this attention but all he's doing is playing around with large-format film photography with a standard View Camera. I'm sure if his new scientist friends had a chance to examine negatives from other photographers using View Cameras they would discover that Large Format film photography crams a lot more information onto a negative than other formats, which has been part of its 180-year appeal. His lenses may be a home-made version of unaffordably expensive telephoto lenses which can be had for commercially produced View Cameras.

One point worth making here is that the justification for film's continuing existance is that it stores information at the level of the molecule, which makes it tough for digital formats to compete with it for sharpness. For this reason the antiquated View Camera may live a long future in the hands of artists who won't compromise on the appearance of their images...

[shadowself]

I concur -- old news

A few years back Kodak even sold a special camera with special
film which had a format of a couple feet by a three or more feet
(I forget the exact format size). The sold a few of them, but they
were extremely expensive and of very limited use since they
were not very transportable. However, anyone can imagine the
amount of detail that can be stored in a film image which is
several square feet in size.

The images are new, the technology is not

Mr. Ross has made a neat camera and has some great images on his website. The images captured with his "extremely" large format camera are very detailed but I can't imagine why Sandia Laboratories would think that this is something revolutionary.

Any good photographer knows that a larger negative translates into a larger quality print - I figure NASA would know this as they chose to take Hasselblad medium format cameras to the moon and other space missions rather than 35MM cameras.

If you scan a 35mm negative at 4000 DPI it will yield a scan of about 20 million pixels. The R-1 camera has a negative 120 times larger than a 35MM which will yield an image of about 2.5 billion pixels. Assuming you have a decent lens, this ought to give incredible detail.

I think the real accomplishment here is that Mr. Ross is able to make detailed scans and have such patience in the darkroom.

Someday I would love to see his work.

[CyberWoLfman]

Imagination + Ingenuity = Innovation

It's the dreamers, 'weirdos' and 'freaks' who will bring new dreams into our imaginations. Let the mindless suits who are virtual captives of their cubicles continue in their lock-steped march into becoming biological automatons, wrinking their collective noses in distate at anything which isn't normal. Theirs must be a boring world, filled only with thoughts of work, sleep, and food.

Somebody needs to install a sense of wonder, curiosity, and some imagination into the minds of the zombies, ere this world becomes as boring as their work environments...

- CyberWoLfman