Fifty million of almost anything is a whole lot. Fifty million inches is almost 800 miles - about the distance from Chicago to Dallas. Fifty million people is more than the population of Spain. And fifty million grains of sand? Around half a ton.

In a camera, fifty million pixels is a pretty impressive number, too. That's enough to see something the size of a small notebook computer in a field 1.5 miles wide. Or resolve every individual hair in a portrait of a model. Or take your professional photography business to a whole new level.

Yesterday, Kodak announced the new KODAK KAF-50100 Image Sensor - at fifty megapixels, it's the highest resolution available for professional photography. Today, the current state of the art is at 39 million pixels (with the KODAK KAF-39000 Image Sensor). But in this market, image is everything - so having the pixels and the performance you need is critical to capturing exactly the shot you want. So now, 50 is the new 39.

The new sensor design - the KODAK TRUESENSE 6.0 micron Full Frame CCD Technology Platform - includes several new features that make possible the performance available from the new sensor. Pixel size has been reduced by almost 30% (from 6.8 micron to 6.0 micron) to enable the increase in resolution. A new four-output architecture was designed to manage the quantity of data available from the sensor - so even though there's so much more data, the frame rate has actually gone up compared to the current 39 MPix device. A new red color pigment provides a subtle but important improvement to color accuracy and fidelity available from the sensor. And a new global reset capability allows the entire sensor to be cleared using a single pulse - shortening the amount of time the sensor needs to be ready to take the next shot, and helping to reduce power (by not needing to clock out the entire sensor before each shot).

Developing a new sensor - and especially one that uses an entirely new technology platform, like the one used here - isn't something that happens overnight. To develop this technology, there was a lot of hard work done to not only come up with the concepts for the new pixel designs and structures, but also to run these new designs through our manufacturing facility in Rochester, test the prototype sensors that are manufactured, understand what is going on, and then make modifications to both the underlying design as well as the manufacturing process to optimize the final result. A lot of work, but also a lot of fun (how often do you get to trick physics to let you do something everyone said wasn't even possible?).

Fifty million is a lot - in seconds, it's about how long Kodak spent developing this new technology. So our fifty million (in time) made possible a new fifty million (in pixels) for professional photographers. And who knows what fifty million that will produce in the future?

What's your fifty million?

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