Kodak has announced a 50 megapixel camera sensor giving photographers the ability to capture unprecedented levels of detail.  The KAF-50100 sensor is also said to draw less power then predecessors. It has an 8176 x 6132 pixel array, equivalent to the 48 mm x 36mm  optical format.

It is, of course, designed for professionals, so perhaps we are being unfair recalling the Nikon consumer division executive who said at Comdex a few years back that no-one would need more than two million pixels. Actually she had a point: the pixel counts of  today's consumer cameras are higher than is required for what most people do with their digital images. She did not take into account the fact that high-resolutions allow you to crop pictures, or do deep zooms, and still get good detail..

Bill Gates always claimed that his famous statement that no-one would need more than 640Kbytes of memory was taken out of context. Still, he never lived that down either.