33 Million Pixel Cameras Are Almost Ready

Nope, that's not a typo. Nor is it a mistake in calculations. Actually such a camera does exist but unfortunately for those of you who love HD movies it won't come out just yet. But hey, the point is it can be done and if that's possible, sooner or later it will land into your living room. Provided you have enough space to project over 33 million pixels of video material.

Although currently video footage is limited to 1080p (1920x1080 pixels @ 24/25/30fps), last week, NHK's (Nippon Hoso Kyokai) Science and Technical Research Laboratories demonstrated what they call "Super Hi-Vision". In essence the story was about a sensor capable of capturing and reproducing moving pictures at a standard resolution of 7680x4320 pixels (above 33Mpix if you do a quick calculus).

At this size the image practically contains 16 times more pixels than a standard 1080p stream. Or if you like to think "big", it's like gluing 16 HD plasmas or LCD TVs together. Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for all electronics manufacturers who like to show off with their big TVs) NHK's sensor is still unable to capture colors so currently the footage can only be monochrome.

NHK announced that they plan to integrate 3 sensors, each sensitive to one primary color in the RGB specter in order to capture colored videos. One more thing which is particularly good at NHK's sensor is the fact that it has a very low refresh time and as a result it can capture about 4000 frames per second.

However there's a downside to having such a huge sensor. And that's storage space since a single minute of footage using NHK's sensor would require about 194GB in uncompressed mode. A solution could come from ATEME which currently produces one of the most efficient H.264 encoders but that will take some time.

On the other hand NHK is also working on a 22.2 sound system which will be paired with the Ultra HD video subsystem. According to them, Super Hi-Vision cameras, recorders and projectors are still in an early stage of development and the first products won't come out until 2009.

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