How is 640,000 like 6,600,000?

Everyone knows about the infamous Bill Gates quote:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

While there's no evidence he actually said it, and in fact he strenuously denies it, it's gone down in geek pop culture as an example of failing to anticipate future tech expansion.

While reading up for the next camera review, I ran across a similarly-flavored quote from 2000, but this one's still right there in plain text on the original website.

In his review of the slick new Nikon Coolpix 990, Phil Askey wrote

"In my personal opinion we'll reach a maximum pixel count, a level at which pro-sumers (those willing to spend upward of $1000 on a digital camera) will have enough pixels (probably around the 6.6 million pixel point - 3000 x 2200)..."

The nine hundred buck Coolpix 990, announced at the end of January '00, had 3.34 megapickles, compared to the 1.3 of the thousand-dollar Sony Mavica FD-88 that had been released just the previous August. (The actual usable MP totals were more like 1.2 for the Mavica and 3.1 for the Coolpix, but when you're in that vicious of an advertising war, you claim every fraction you can.)

"Make sure you don't leave so much as a kilopixel lying on the table!"

These days, of course, full-frame sensors of forty, fifty, or sixty megapixels are everywhere and medium format sensors have crossed the triple-digit MP threshold...with no decimal places this time.

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