Area Scan Cameras have been used to help paper making operations decrease waste and delay and increase speed (realized capacity) since the mid-nineties. Advances in consumer grade cameras, computer hardware and software (cell phones and the gaming industry) continue to drive our industry by developing better camera sensors, imaging hardware and compression/decompression engines (CODEC). This translates into significant increases in the quality and quantity of pixels that provide the resolution operators required to solve downtime issues. This paper outlines these critical milestones and will help showcase to the paper maker what performance benefits they should be seeing on their existing web monitoring and web inspection systems.