Courtesy the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

(September 24, 2010) If in the course of the Packers at Chicago Bears game at Soldier Field there is a close play at the goal line, viewers may be in store for a look on ESPN's "Monday Night Football" that they have only been able to get in recent Super Bowls.

This National Football League season, ESPN is using a camera technology called Maxx Zoom.

The network will install clusters of four small, unmanned cameras (2 to 3 inches square) perpendicular to both goal lines on both the near and far sidelines at Soldier Field, just as they have done the first two weeks of the season for Monday night games at the New Meadowlands Stadium and at Candlestick Park.

Each camera is mounted on an adjustable frame and fixed on the goal line, shooting a specific area of the field up to eight times normal HD resolution. The images from the cameras are aligned by way of stitching technology to create large, high-resolution panoramic images that can be zoomed to show close-ups in the red zone and at the goal line. Similar cameras are positioned at the 50-yard line to capture key plays near midfield.

In the New Orleans Saints at San Francisco 49ers game on Monday, the technology was applied to a key play that helped determine a score at the end of the game.

Forty-Niners tight end Vernon Davis caught a pass for a two-point conversion with less than two minutes left in the fourth quarter.

Davis' catch initially was not ruled a conversion because the officials thought he was not across the plane of the goal line when he made the catch.

But during the review, the replay official was able to use the Maxx Zoom goal-line look to determine that Davis was in the air in the plane of the goal line and had secured the pass. Television viewers got the same look. The call was reversed, allowing the 49ers to tie the game at 22-22.

The Saints went on to kick a field goal as time expired and won, 25-22.

"Having these cameras increases the probability of capturing the definitive look on key plays," said Bill Hofheimer, a spokesman for ESPN.

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