Digital photography, not the palmtop computer, is my favorite example of the triumph of Moore’s Law. Ten years ago we were still using film and Kodak was still making a lot of money doing it. Black and white ISO 400 film could be pushed up to 3200 if you had to underexpose it, but the results looked terrible. With color film pushed negatives would look even worse, and you needed a custom color lab to do it for you.

Today you can buy a Canon EOS SD Mark II, which has 21.1 million pixels per frame, and ISO up to 25600. Those are numbers beyond the imagination of anyone shooting pictures a decade ago.

Of course, in ten years, after the technology moves on, no one will be impressed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under The explosion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.