If you’re a photographer then megapixels are your form of measurement but researchers at Duke University have stepped a camera up into the gigapixel range.

Duke’s camera is called the Aware-2 and uses 96 14-megapixel sensors in a configuration that allows the camera to capture a much wider field of view than other existing gigapixel cameras.

It takes 18 seconds to snap an image with the Aware-2, limited to black-and-white, but the resolution is high enough that even tiny portions of the image can be expanded to look like they were snapped by a conventional camera.

The Aware-2 is not ready for public consumption just yet. It weighs around 100 pounds (45kg) and is too bulky to be used easily. The Duke researchers claim that they will be able to have a 10-gigapixel version of this camera functional by the end of this year however.

Source: PC World