Is there room for a Gigapixel camera in this war of megapixels

Mobile cameras, especially smartphone cameras have become immensely popular. So much so in fact that the Apple iPhone 4 went on to become the most popular camera on the Flickr photo sharing service.

The recently released Nokia 808 Pureview is a modern megapixel marvel, with 41 megapixels on the largest smartphone camera sensor to date, the photos captured on the Pureview are unmatched.

The 808 Pureview is even challenging DSLR cameras but the keen photographer will still find that modern cameras lack the fine . This is probably about to end in the near future as Gigapixel cameras are slowly becoming a reality

A new super camera is being developed at Duke University and it is capable of capturing images at a staggering 960 million pixels.

It creates this image  by stitching together images captured from 98 separate 14 megapixel sensors. Previous examples of Gigabit photography relied on panning a camera across a scene, subsequently capturing images which are stitched together later. This device however captures all images simultaneously. Check out the following photo captured with this camera which shows pictures of a traffic circle.

This inset images are digitally magnified by a factor of 13 and show details from 15 meters to 93 meters away. The images provide a 120°-wide view similar to what you will get from a fish-eye lens.

How soon will we see on of these in our smartphone ? Well probably not in the near future. The camera pictured below measures in at 30 x 30 x 20 inches and weighs 93 kilos, so the challenge remains to bring the technology to a DSLR before it can be minimized to fit a smartphone.

source - Nature