When I worked on my PhD, digital cameras were first hitting the scene (I used conventional B&W film). I looked into converting my equipment to digital. At the time I believe Canon was selling an 8 megapixel digital camera for about $8,000. The conventional B&W film was equivalent to about 34 megapixels (resolution of about 5 microns). I just checked and 400 megapixel digital cameras are out there, if you want to pay around $8,000 :) Pretty interesting that state of the art digital cameras cost about the same as almost 30 years ago, but with 50x the resolution.
When I worked on my PhD, digital cameras were first hitting the scene (I used conventional B&W film). I looked into converting my equipment to digital. At the time I believe Canon was selling an 8 megapixel digital camera for about $8,000. The conventional B&W film was equivalent to about 34 megapixels (resolution of about 5 microns). I just checked and 400 megapixel digital cameras are out there, if you want to pay around $8,000 :) Pretty interesting that state of the art digital cameras cost about the same as almost 30 years ago, but with 50x the resolution.
$8K for a camera - I've spent more than that on a single lens. Fortunately, it was the company's money.