More Pictures of "Curiosity" Taken From Orbit, page 2

Originally posted by HIWATT
reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

I'm taking a wait and "see" approach. The fact is whether operational or not, the cams are still limited by a MAX of 2 megapixel, which technologically speaking, is ancient.

It's "ancient" for you because you fall for hype that more MP is always "better". 2MP is 1600x1200 which is more than plenty/sufficient. If they need mega images like panoramas, they can do this with shooting multiple images and appending images. You can make extremely large images like 20.000 x 5.000 with a 1MP camera, as has been done in the past.

The 2MP camera is also used for very close up imaging, almost like a microscope, where the 1600x1200 will cover an area barely an inch where the 2MP are still plenty to

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[MAHLI CAM]
At close focus (22.5 mm), images will have a resolution of about 15 micrometers (0.0006 inch) per pixel and cover an area of about 18 by 24 mm (0.7 by 0.9 inch). At a working distance of 50 mm (nearly 2 inches), images will have a resolution of about 24.5 micrometers (0.001 inch) per pixel. At the distance which the MER MI takes pictures, 66 mm (2.6 inches), the resolution is about the same as MI (31 micrometers per pixel), but the pictures cover a larger area and are in color.
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Because MAHLI can focus at infinity, in addition to being able to get microscopic views of surface materials MAHLI can also be used for other purposes, including inspection of areas on the rover or imaging the local landscape.

Stereo (3D) views of selected targets can be acquired by taking 2 images of a target from different looking angles. This is achieved by moving the robotic arm to place the camera in the two different positions.
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There is simply no reason to put 8MP or bigger cameras up there, it would also increase processing times and times it needs to transmit images to Earth.

Example: I myself have a rather old, 6MP Nikon cam. A 6MP image would be already far too big, it would not even fit my on my PC desktop, so i set my camera to take 3MP pix instead. The benefit is that far more pictures fit in memory and it takes much less time to download via USB to my computer. So you can imagine that "downloading" a 8MP image from Mars would be moronic since there is just no benefit.

Also..let me get this straight...8MP would equal 4096pix x 2048 pix - so...tell me why an iPhone user needs to take images of that size or why it should be "better", unless you want to tell me you have a display/monitor which works with that resolution. In reality, you will have to greatly resize your images each and every time AND you waste your SD card because someone told you "8MP is better"

edit on 7-8-2012 by flexy123 because: (no reason given)