Holograms fascinate people because of their ability to display three-dimensional information in a single two-dimensional image. But making holograms is hard, largely because of the huge amount of information that must be captured to get decent resolution.
That wasn’t a problem in the days of old-fashioned photography because photographic film had a resolution that put digital cameras is to shame. But the electronic CCDs required to do the same job must have gigapixel capability, something that is only possible with the most expensive equipment.
Astronomers, for example, have CCD chips with over 0.1 gigapixels. But the best digital cameras have only megapixel capability, which means that holographers have to rely on complex scanning protocols to get decent results.
Today, Tomoyoshi Shimobaba at Chiba University in Japan, and a few buddies, say they’ve worked out how to take high-resolution holograms without using expensive digital cameras. Instead, these guys have built a digital holographic microscope with gigapixel resolution using only a laser and a cheap digital scanner.
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