The FBI has a database consisting of some 200 million fingerprint records... As part of a modernization program, the FBI is digitizing these records as 8-bit grayscale images, with a spatial resolution of 500 dots per inch. This results in some 10 megabytes per card, making the current archive about 2,000 terabytes in size.

        ---C.M. Brislawn

Fingerprints go digital, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, volume 42, 1995, page 1278.

Back to Quotes selected by Palle Jorgensen