The camera, shown today at IDF, is just a prototype, made up of a few components form other companies (a Sony IMX036 CMOS image sensor, for one), but it’s damn impressive. Due to the speed of USB 3.0, the webcam is capable of streaming and displaying its 1920×1080 video without compression, which makes for huge files but also extremely sharp image quality. The camera lacked autofocus but manual focus let it capture incredibly crisp images, even all the miniscule elements of a PCI-Express card. Of course, as USB 3.0 isn’t exactly widely available, you have to run it through that PCI-Express-to-USB-3.0 card, but Point Grey says it’ll be ready for release in either very late 2009 or early 2010. [Point Grey]
matt
September 24, 2009 at 9:46 AM
I think the key word in the product name that they may have overlooked is WEB!
I don’t know about you, but my Optus cable is going to struggle uploading at 3Gbps…
will be good in the future tho, means the encoder can be moved to software in the pc rather than extra hardware in the webcam.
In fact with a GPGPU encoder, it may even be possible to encode this data in real time for web use now.
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