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That article had me super-awesome-excited, then dropped the "that's so stupid" sledgehammer on me with this quote:

"There's one catch for Google: While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 centimeters, Google will only receive images at a 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction."

Oh well.

Do you think you can tell the difference between 3742 pixels per mile and 3218?

For reference, the google sats of my house have about 20cm pixels at maximum zoom, but they appear to have been upsampled or low pass filterd by maybe a factor of 3 or so judging by the noise in the trees. Possibly this will be better resolution, but there will certainly be less noise. My corner of the world is pretty grainy.

Given that 43 and 50 are relatively prime this could mean a much lower effective resolution after processing the images if they're taken at full resolution and digitally manipulated. That would kind of suck.

I have no idea how the optics systems work at this level, but if they can mechanically zoom out ~15% they can be sent to Google at sensor native resolution.

When the gap between what the US federal government will allow and what the sensors can do grows a little bit more, I wonder if we'll start to see foreign countries advance in selling photography to corporations. The article mentions that the US government has had the ability to read newspaper headlines since the 70s -- given the progress of things it has to be getting affordable.

I'm more offended that there's a governmental restriction than the specifics of what it means.
First Brender says "we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground." then "Google's partnership with GeoEye is exclusive, meaning the search-engine giant will be the only online mapping site using the satellite's photos."

So which is it?

sweet