[Leica] No Crop Factor (was: Say Hello to Hermes Leica AND cropfactor)

[jonathan at openhealth.org (Jonathan Borden)]

Frank Filippone wrote:

> Theoretically impossible.... meaning there have been types of 
> technologies
> that have been tried to get to get semiconductor chips closer together.
> Mostly these ideas have failed.  But to recreate an image, you need to
> capture a continuous array of rays.  If you lose some space between 
> chips,
> then you must invent those pixels.  Certainly not a good idea at image
> capture.

There are ways to stitch sensor arrays together... one technique is to 
use a secondary lens array to direct each portion of the image to a 
particular array.
>
> The real problem is that you want to buy the larger chip at a cheap 
> price.
> It does not work that way.  Bigger chips = more costly.  If you were 
> NASA,
> you could have a 12 inch chip ( 8x10 dreamers ) but the cost would be
(sic)
> astronomical.
:-)

I suspect they use sensor arrays. I don't know exactly when these super 
high resolution imaging 'projects' switched over entirely to digital 
but one would presume that the announcement to drop Techpan followed 
sometime not terribly long after this.

Jonathan