14 DAY TRIAL // UltraCamLp is a digital aerial photogrammetric camera produced by Microsoft. The Redmond company's UltraCam products come from the acquisition of Vexcel, and are used for the imagery integrated into Virtual Earth. At the same time the photographic equipment is also commercialized to companies working with aerial imagery. At no less than 92 megapixels, the UltraCamLp is just a medium format camera, as the Redmond company has managed in fact to break the 200-megapixel milestone with its large format camera UltraCamX. For both the UltraCamLp and the UltraCamX, customers will need at least a small aircraft in order to capture aerial imagery such as the content available via Virtual Earth.
“The UltraCamLp delivers on our promise to customers to continuously strive to provide newer and better technologies that include an upgrade path to allow those customers to migrate to new products without necessarily needing to abandon their existing tools from Vexcel Imaging,” revealed Alexander Wiechert, business director of Microsoft, and managing director for Vexcel Imaging GmbH. “The technical capabilities of this camera, along with its package size and price point make it an unbeatable value for small mapping firms, larger organizations needing a dedicated system for targeted, smaller projects, and those wishing to integrate an aerial and lidar system in the same aircraft.”
UltraCamLp is the evolution of UltraCamL, coming just eight months after its predecessor, and was announced at the 2009 annual conference for the American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing (ASPRS) in Baltimore, earlier this year. But while the UltraCamL was limited to just a 64-megapixel format, the UltraCamLp goes as high as 92 megapixels and is capable of 11,704 x 7,920 pixel pans. According to Microsoft, customers will not be able to find a larger footprint medium format camera system on the market at this point in time. Microsoft indicated that UltraCamLp would start being available as of November 2009.
“The UltraCamLp features a 1:2.2 pan sharpen ratio and collects RGB and NIR in parallel, all with forward motion compensation by TDI, allowing it to deliver brilliant true-color and color-infrared (CIR) image quality with unmatched radiometric range, and making it ideal for smaller large-scale and photogrammetric projects, high-resolution (true) orthophoto production, multi-ray photogrammetry, corridor mapping, and lidar integration. It also takes advantage of the computing and storage subsystems introduced with the UltraCamX large format sensor system that include removable storage units for longer flight missions and reduced ground time but utilized solid state devices for higher integration,” Microsoft informed.