Microsoft manufactures its own photographic equipment tailored specifically for the process of capturing imagery used in the Virtual Earth platform. UltraCamX is a 216 mega-pixel large format digital aerial camera and the main source of images for Virtual Earth 3D models. The Redmond company is constantly working to add superior 3D models of locations around the world to Virtual Earth, both in terms of sophistication and volume. At this point in time, Virtual Earth offers users no less than 250 complete cities "built" through an automated photogrammetric processing system.

"The 3D models we create for Virtual Earth use a combination of sources," revealed Mark Brown, Senior Product Manager Virtual Earth. "Primarily though, the data used in our photogrammetric processing that creates our models comes from the UltraCam that we manufacture."

According to Microsoft, the camera features an excellent balance between the high rate of pixel collecting and radiometric performance. Responsible not only for capturing pixels at a rate of 3 GBits per second, but also for the 216 gross pixels image format is the UltraCamX's CCD technology.

"This thing is incredible, 216 mega-pixels with a panchromatic image size of 14,430 x 9,420 pixels, capturing data at over 3 GBits/sec, 13 CCD's - 7 pan and 4 color (RGB + Near IR) and 14 CPU's to process the raw images and data in real-time. The data units for the camera hold 1.7TB, enough for about 4,700 images. Since they are swappable the only limitation to how much imagery you can collect is how big your aircraft is to hold these units," Brown added.

UltraCamX also comes with a new lens optical system which offers a 1:3 pan-to-color ratio. The camera is simply packed with technology. A very low level of occlusions, Digital Elevation Models free of spikes and holes, as well as ortho-photo production available for central areas in images are all supported by UltraCamX.

"Camera customers will be thrilled with the entirely new data flow concept that allows unlimited image collection in the air. Low-cost, exchangeable data storage devices called DX units hold 1.7 TBytes each. When one unit is filled (with about 4700 UCX images), it can simply be replaced with another during flight. Five pairs of DX units can collect more than 20,000 images in redundant mode, each image stored twice. The DX units can now be directly shipped to the home office or copied into a single large capacity disk or tape," reads a fragment of Microsoft's description of the camera.