Do you remember the people from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, Germany, the inventors of the MP3 format? Well, it seems that they've kept themselves quite busy after practically changing the whole world (after all, the MP3 format is now quite an important part of the world's history), and launched what seems to be the world's smallest HDTV camera, measuring only 4 x 4 x 8 centimeters.

As HDTV is slowly becoming a standard for both TV sets and broadcasters, the development achieved by the German institute could prove to be quite useful in a large number of situations, especially in those when a normal camera is simply way too bulky. Moreover, the quality of the images promises to be quite high, since this petite wonder will deliver a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and a variable frame rate of up to 60 frames per second, thus meeting the requirements of professional HDTV production studios.

Here is what Stephan Gick, group leader at the IIS institute, had to say about their latest development, according to the www.ue.dk website: "We achieved this chiefly by taking two different approaches: The camera's electronics have a very low power loss, which means that little heat is generated and the housing can thus be kept very small. By using highly integrated parts, we were able to fit all of the components such as the image sensor, the analog-to-digital converter, the color processor and several interfaces into the tiny space available inside the camera".

Another very interesting element about this camera is that all its parameters, as for example color settings, white balance, image format and frame rate, can be controlled using the integrated software, via a web browser, which makes it extremely easy to use, even by home users. The camera has already been licensed to several companies, and we're all waiting to see it on the shelves as soon as possible.

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