You call that a lens? THIS is a lens...

[Moonliner]

For all you photographers out there...

The world's most amazing digital photography company isn't Canon or Nikon. It's a tiny company in Tucson, Arizona: Spectral Instruments. They make the craziest digital cameras on the planet. This one has a dynamic range so incredibly big that it can photograph both the sun and the stars in broad daylight.

It's their 1110 series, a device with a 112 megapixel CCD, black and white, with no Bayer mask or filter of any type, "nothing to detract from the overall image sharpness." Their sensors are extremely light sensitive and can take exposures that last for hours without any noise at all. That's why you can do something like taking a picture of a starry sky in the middle of the day.

The sensor measures 95 x 95 millimeters. For comparison, a typical DSLR has a 24 x 36 mm millimeters sensor. A medium format camera, like a Hasselblad, uses a 48 x 36 millimeters sensor. It's a staggering difference, over five times the area. These things suck light like black holes.

Usually, Spectral Instruments' cooled, ultra-expensive custom CCD-based camera systems end up in orbit or in closely monitored in the installations of laboratories and research institutions around the world. But they want to give this camera to a professional photographer, so she or he can take some stunning shots.