World's smallest camera is the size of a grain of sand

OmniVision OV6948 enters the Guinness Book of Records as the world's smallest camera.

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The world's smallest camera has just famously entered the Guinness Book of Records, with the OmniVision OV6948 as small as a grain of sand.

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OmniVision OV6948 measures in super-small at just 0.575 x 0.575 x 0.232mm and is good for 40,000-pixel color images using an RGB Bayer back-side-illuminating chip. This new camera is ridiculosuly small, but it's for specific use cases in surgery.

With the OmniVision OV6948 surgeions can have a camera so small it will fit into the smallest veins inside of the human body. This provides surgeons and doctors that have the OmniVision OV6948 with next-gen camera access for future surgeries.

Until now, surgeons do this without any camera -- acting blind. The only cameras capable of anything close to this are very few, but they also have a much lower resolution fiber optic feed. The new OmniVision OV6948 captures images at 30FPS, and can have analog output at over 4mm away with minimal noise.

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The OmniVision OV6948 has a 120-degree super-side angle field of view, something that on a regular camera would come up as 14nm on a full-frame sensor. The depth of field for the OmniVision OV6948 spans between 3mm and 30mm.

You can't be inside the tiniest of veins inside of the human body with a camera sensor that operates, generating heat... right? Well, the OmniVision OV6948 will be super-useful in areas like neurology, ophthalmology, ENT, cardiology, spinal injuries, urology, gynecology and arthroscopy.

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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