Why Film in a Digital World?

With the advent of inexpensive mass media storage and high powered desktop computers, satellite imagery distributors and their customers have come to prefer digital data instead of printed material for processing, distribution, and analysis. And why not? If the area you need to look at is small, you can just click with your mouse and pull up the region you want onto your desktop monitor, manipulate the data, and print it on a low resolution printer. But what happens when you want to see more than just the square kilometer of one meter resolution data that a standard monitor can display? What happens when you want to see a whole state (like Connecticut) at once? You can line up 13,000 monitors or scroll through 13,000 pictures (hoping your computer does not crash) or you can record the entire state on two strips of film 9.5" film that are 25" long with an IGI EBIR.. The final product is the entire state, region or country at the satellite sensor’ basic resolution or any desired scale factor. You can study the entire state; add GIS data or annotation to the imagery; or you can record a printing plate film master for mass distribution.

Precision Broad Area Coverage Applications

Film is still required for viewing and printing a wide variety of precision broad area coverage applications, such as:

The following illustrations which show the satellite area coverage that can be recorded on film at 1, 3 and 5 meter resolutions clearly demonstrate why film is a necessary complimentary product to remote sensing digital data sets.

Area Coverage of New England at 1, 3 and 5 Meters

Coverage at 1 Meter

Coverage at 5 Meters

The area imaged on film gives the user an expanded field of view to visualize the entire state, region or country at a glance and the image can be easily enlarged to any desired scale for exploitation or map production.

Note: The coverage shown is for illustration only and the area is not a representation of satellite orbit paths.

EBR Film and Other Storage Media Comparisons 

Electron beam recording of imagery on film also has specific advantages over recording on magnetic and optical storage media. A terabyte of uncompressed data can be recorded on a single roll of 9.5" film 235’ long with the EBIR, compared to recording on 200 exabyte tapes or 217 (4.6 gigabyte) optical disks. The time to record a terabyte of data with an EBIR is 14 hours compared to 70 hours using exabyte tapes and 275 hours using 4.6 gigabyte optical disks.

The volume of space required to store 1 terabyte of data on a 9.5" roll of film is only 0.1 cubic feet compared to 0.9 cubic feet of exabyte tapes and 1.6 cubic feet of 4.6 gigabyte optical disks. This volume does include any mechanical mechanism for storing and retrieving the media i.e. optical jukeboxes, magnetic tape drives, etc.

The cost of the media for storing a terabyte of data on exabyte tape is 2.8 times higher and optical disk is 35 times higher than EBIR film.

Another advantage of film, is that the film is archival and its images may be viewed at any time in the future (hundreds of years) using optical readers. Film is not subject to explosive technology changes causing obsolescence of digital reading equipment for image data retrieval.

For More Information Contact:

Image Graphics, Inc.
917 Bridgeport Avenue, Shelton, CT 06484
Tel: 888-464-6243
FAX: 203-926-9705
Internet: marketing@igraph.com

Copyright © 2002 Image Graphics, Inc.
Last modified: August 23, 2002