You want pixels? You got ‘em!

I’d never heard of Seitz cameras until I read “See the Seitz as You’ve Never Seen Them Before“ (Photonics.com, December 2010,) probably because they’re out of my price range, but it seems they offer some of the highest megapixel counts of any manufacturer.

The Seitz 6x17 camera can grab a color image measuring 7,500 by 21,250 pixels in 1 second, thanks to a special sensor from Dalsa. Yes, that’s 160 megapixels. Now who, you may be asking, wants to take pictures with resolution that high?

Well the answer seems to be high-end professional landscape photographers. These are guys who worry mightily about the dpi (dots per inch) at which their work can be reproduced. The rule of thumb is that a photo will start to look blurry if it’s enlarged to less than 150 dpi, and obviously enough, a higher dpi count gives a better image.

Photos taken with the Seitz 6x17 can be enlarged to 6 feet long by 2 feet high, at 300 dpi. That means these cameras can take pictures suitable for incorporating into huge advertising hoardings, or perhaps more attractively, for gorgeous artworks fit for a gallery.

To see what such a picture looks like, let me send you to the web site of David Osborn, a London-based photographer who has been putting the camera to work.

The price tag for the Seitz 6x17 is almost as large: €32,000. And think how much more you’d need to spend on a hard drive to store those pictures!