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Because consumers don't understand diffracton and false magnification but do understand a bigger number. Too bad this is only going to make the red amplification problem worse as at a pixel size of 800nm it is getting awfully close to the long range of visible red so it will capture even less of that. I would be willing to be I can capture a better quality image with my old K-2000 (10 year old 10MP DLSR) and old screw mount 8 element SMC Takumar f/1.4 but if I used my K-3 and my modern good glass (I own the 3 princesses) I would absolutely crush it. I'd even be willing to bet I could do better than this sensor with a roll of Ektar100 in my Spotmatic F using that same 50mm f/1.4 lens although it would have more noise from the grain.

That said Sony does make some damn fine sensors but no one who knows about optics and sensors really expects this to compete with even entry level DSLRs or mirror-less interchangeable lens cameras, let alone those monster digital medium formats from Hasselblad or Pentax. Instead it will be something for consumers to get into a phone pissing contest over and believe that they can take pictures just as good as a pro can.

Perhaps an add-on that allowed you to attach professional lenses to your iPhone (which already has a pretty good CCD.)

People already do make add on lenses for iPhones and while they will give you some telephoto abilities they will never produce professional results. The reason is that the sensor in the iPhone and stock lens are already diffraction limited so any lens with a greater f-stop than the factory one will only make that worse. Also since no lens is perfect adding another one will only introduce additional optical defects and aberrations into the final image. Now some times this is acceptable (look at 1.4x and 2x telephoto converters) but the results are not as good as just using a larger lens to begin with. For example I have a very nice SMC Takumar 200mm lens and a really cheap 400mm lens, I get better results with the cheap 400mm lens than using the 200mm with a 2x telephoto converter. That said before I got the 400mm I would use the 200mm + 2x converter for that extra reach as the results were still better than a tighter crop of an image taken with just the 200mm lens. So don't expect adding more glass in front will work miracles.

Moving on to sensors the iPhone has a very good sensor for its size but it is still a tiny sensor (about 6mm x 5mm). Compare that to a professional full frame sensor that is 24mm x 36mm, APS-C 22mm x 14mm, medium format (43mm x 32mm or 53mm x 40mm) sensor. The light gathering ability of those larger sensors is substantially better that the tiny sensors in cellphones. The iPhone does use a back illuminated sensor which does help it out with high ISO noise but even then the high ISO performance of the larger sensors is vastly superior. It looks like the iPhone tops out at ISO 1250 which is pretty damn low compared to even an old DSLR (I have a 10 year old one that tops out at ISO 3200 and one less than 2 years old that tops out at ISO 51,200) and the amount of noise in the image from the iPhone is comparable to my newest camera at ISO 25,600 or the older one at ISO1600.

Then you have the combination of the existing lens plus sensor on the phone which produces a very deep depth of field, even with the "telephoto" lens on the iPhone. Yes software can fake it but there is a reason that professionals like a mild telephoto (in the 70mm to 150mm range) with a nice f/2 aperture on a full frame camera or better yet a 200mm on a medium format for portraits. The depth of field comes about because of the sensor size and focal length so a big sensor with a big lens will give you a shallower depth of field while the tiny sensor (crop factor of about 7) with tiny focal length (about 4mm) give a very deep depth of field. If I want that I will stick my 17mm fish-eye or 28mm wide angle on my full frame camera, set the f-stop to f/11 or f/16 spin the focusing ring over to about 2 meters and not bother focusing it again and go do some street photography. In looking at a lab test of the iPhone 8 image quality I'm not impressed with what it produces under ideal circumstances but there one is a pixel peeper.

All that aside a camera like what one finds on a modern good quality cell phone will be all most people, 99% of people fall in this category, will ever need and they will never find the camera being the limiting factor in their photography ability. The only area that these cameras could really improve would be in noise reduction, especially at high ISO, as they are at the limits of what can be done to improve image quality with optics and pixel densities. Even there they may be rapidly approaching the limits but I don't know much about that area of senso

Well that Nokia 1020 was a very diffraction limited camera. you don't have to take my word for it as a purely objective test clearly shows it (those are some really bad diffraction artifacts). Not to mention it really lacks dynamic range and is a pretty noisy sensor to boot. So while you would get 40 million dots there really isn't 40 million dots worth of data, and from a quick eyeballing of that test it looks like it would be about 8 megapixels of noisy low dynamic range information.

But what if I really want diffraction limited low res low dynamic range photographs taken with low quality fixed aperture lenses captured with a noisy little sensor.

Even setting that aside I would still prefer a DSLR over a cellphone or point and shoot camera because with a cellphone you are stuck with one lens and a fixed field of view where as the DSLR gives you options. While I don't have a DSLR I still have an old film SLR with a selection of really good lenses ranging from a 17mm fish eye up to a 500mm telephoto. Yes you can "zoom" with a cellphone but there the camera is just making crap up as it is digital zoom. Then lets add in the other accessories like extension tubes (for macro photography), polarizing filters (if you have never used one they are wonderful), ND filters (in case you want to do super long exposures in daylight), ring flashes, bounce flashes, a tripod mount, etc. that don't exist for cellphone cameras of if they do are a cheesy add on that will only decrease the image quality.

You are right that the DSLR isn't going away for proper photography as there are hard optical limits for what can be done can be done with a tiny sensor and tiny lens and that limit was passed years ago. For most people a cellphone camera is all they need and the more automated it is they better photos they will take because they don't want to understand photography and the photos they take will just get dumped onto facebook. For those who's photos get blown up to poster size (24 inches x 36 inches), or get published in glossy high quality printed books a cellphone camera doesn't cut it and never will.

Hell 4k can't even encode all of the data in good 35mm film. I speak as someone, a dedicated amateur photographer, who owns a nice film scanner and took the time to master it as well as the camera and lenses I own so take that at what it is worth.

Using good quality 35mm film with good high quality lenses with multiple scans of a frame one can approach the claimed resolution of the scanner (10,000DPI) which after some cropping of the image stack produces an image of around 130 megapixels at 16 bits per channel of color depth of which there is about 80 mega pixels of data there. While I do upscale the images I always down scale them back as the scanner is diffraction limited below its output resolution so I use super resolution to work around that and get as much actual information there as I can.

In theory if I had a scanner that had better resolution (very difficult to find) and really took the time to setup a shot in a perfect environment (no movement, perfect focus) and had lenses that were perfectly sharp at wide open aperture of f/1.4 (I don't) I could get close to 400 megapixels but likely only out of B&W film but this is just theory. Going up to 120 or 70mm film and you are now looking at single frames that have 400-500 megapixels of actual data in normal circumstances.

the iPhone 7 Plus has a pair of 12MP cameras that are able to take SLR-quality images

Don't lie to me.

It has a tiny little sensor that assuming has perfect glass is just providing false magnification as the lens is a f/1.8 with a pixel edge size of about 1.2um (assuming the same size sensor as in the Apple iPhone 5S) but the diameter of the airy disk would be 3.7um. So the smallest item resolvable would fill about a 3x3 grid. Granted software can get rid of some of that but it isn't going to magically make it deliver results like a full frame SLR with good lenses.

While it is probably a better camera than most other cellphones (seriously these cameras are shit) don't say it holds a candle to an older full frame DSLR or even my 40+ year old film SLR that has some really nice lenses with good film.

This isn't the little shit sensor that comes with the cheap point and shoots, or cellphones which are all diffraction limited now and have shit lenses. Still I am not impressed with the cannon as something like this exists which has an even larger sensor. For a reasonable comparison (not actual size) of the different sensor sizes you can check this out. Most of the consumer cameras in phones and point and shoots have the 1/2.5 or 1/1.7 sized sensor in them.The hasselblad sensor likely isn't the 60mm X 60mm that film frame was but it is bigger than the 35mm full frame. The full frame sensor like what is mentioned for this cannon is the same size as a standard 35mm film frame.

Then again I only find this interesting from a technological perspective as I still use a film camera (go go Pentax Spotmatic F that never seems to want to die). Personally I like film I know how film behaves on the extremes (also known as how it fails), and have a lot of good lenses and accessories for taking the pictures I want with my film camera. When I was in Israel with work and went on a tour of Jerusalem I took some great pictures with my camera that while being made fun of by my co-workers who just had their phones as I had the antique. I also have taken a liking to slow black and white film (ISO 50) if I really want clear crisp pictures and for color I usually just stick to ISO 100.

Considering the sensors, even an ideal lens would still be diffraction limited at this resolution. Granted with some post processing and anti aliasing you can probably still get slightly better resolution than pure diffraction limited but anything beyond about 10-12MP range on those little sensors is just spiking the numbers, and the difference between 8MP and 10MP isn't enough to really matter. This also assumes that the lenses are ideal f1 lenses instead of the typical cheap f2 to f3 lenses that are used in phones and cheap compact cameras.

I would include the megapixel count in that PR campaign now. All of the compact point and shoot digital cameras are diffraction limited with their 1/2.3" sensors and silly pixel counts. I recently purchased a new camera for my wife (the digital camera she was using gave up the ghost) and was inundated with the lie that more pixels are better by the "helpful" sales staff. Thus far I haven't found a shibboleth that will let them know I know what I am doing and to go the hell away. Since my wife wants a camera for taking pictures of the kids fast image acquisition and focus speed are the points that differentiate one camera from another but try explaining that to the useless clerk. Sadly the best digital camera we own, going by image quality alone, is the first one we ever got about 12 years ago that strangely still works. It is only 8 megapixels and takes those awful XD cards but has a larger better quality lens, and a larger sensor but it is slow to focus, and slow to write. Also for a different take on the airy disc and what it means to photography there is this page that shows some real world effects.

I wouldn't get too worked up about cameras most people use they aren't great and will likely never capture great photos that will win awards and be in books. That isn't want people want, they want something that will capture reasonable pictures of their kids first birthday party. On the professional end there are the good DSLRs that wedding photographers and studios use with proper lighting. Finally you have the people who do photography as art and there you see film and digital being used but it is a personal preference at that point, not a technical decision. Personally I like film, I started with film, I learned on film, I understand how film behaves, and I have a camera that doesn't try to do what it wants instead of what I want, no automatic anything,

Even an ideal lens becomes diffraction limited at which point 2 things start to happen on the sensor and film. The first one is what is known as false magnification where the smallest feature the lens is capable of resolving is larger than the pixel size. So in this case extra pixels aren't adding anything to the image quality and the only real difference between those adjacent pixels would be the noise in the sensor. This also creates a sort of soft focus, and while you have this huge image there isn't that much information actually there. False magnification happens more often at lower f stops with lower quality lenses and smaller sensors but even is a concern with high quality lenses with full size sensors at higher f stops. Also with diffraction limited images you have the diffraction interference pattern that further degrades your image and leads to loss of detail. Both of these types artifacts are things you are not going to be able to deal with in post processing unless you have a special camera with more advanced optics specifically designed to be used in diffraction limited situations and even then it takes a lot of post processing.

If you want to find out more here is as good article on the subject and be sure to go down to the what it looks like section to see what happens at higher f stops on a higher end camera. Way back in the old days I was taught how to avoid these problems by not shooting at anything higher than f/8 with 100 speed black and white film. Granted that was with a 55mm F/2.8 lens (I think that is what it was) on a Pentax K1000 in high school but that rule still holds today. Granted there were times when you would want to shoot at an f stop higher than 8 but you knew and understood why you were doing that. I still like taking waterfall pictures using a really high f stop with the long exposure but there even though the image is diffraction limited the image really doesn't have a sharp focus anyways because of the mist plus it gives a bit more of an ethereal feel with the soft focus.

Since you stated everything else being the same I still might go for the 16mp one depending on sensor size. On the low end with small sensors that have high pixel counts they have probably already crossed over where having more pixels doesn't offers a better image. At some point the image becomes diffraction limited and the cheap lenses only make that happen sooner. Even on full size sensors in most DSLRs it wouldn't surprise me if some of them were diffraction limited at some higher f stops now.

While pixel count matters we have probably already crossed into the realm where lenses are going to be more important for picture quality than pixel count unless you have a Hasselblad with a full frame digital back. Most people understand megapixels and for a long time a higher count meant you would get better pictures but as soon as you mention diffraction limits you have lost them. This was something that I was taught about years ago in high school in the photography class using Pentax K1000s and ISO100 black and white film with the general rule that for crisp pictures don't stop the lens down beyond f/8. There are exceptions like you really want a very high depth of focus or you are doing a very long exposure but you understood why you were doing those things.

The GP is also right in that now days camera chassis are fairly disposable unless you are looking at the very high end ones. I still have my Pentax Spotmatic F with close to a full complement of good lenses (looking for an M42 screw mount 17mm fisheye and 400-500mm range telephoto at reasonable prices) and as long as the camera shop near me exists I will keep on using it. My wife however is on her 4th digital camera in 10 years as they just don't last even though my SpotmaticF has been exposed to substantially harsher conditions while I have owned it for almost the last 20 years.

Yes you want it. There are two things the humungous DSLR lenses give you: More light so you can capture images in dark situations with less noise. And shallow depth of field.

We''re finally reaching the point I predicted in the early 1990s when the first digital cameras with reduced sensor size came out. That spawned endless debates about what exactly the sensor size did to the depth of field. It turns out when you reduce sensor size, you increase depth of field. This results in photos that look like they were shot with a point and shoot modern digital cameras - everything in the photo is in sharp focus. This happens in the 35mm point and shoot because the lens has a small aperture (ratio of lens diameter to focal length). In digital cameras it happens because they use a tiny fingernail-sized sensor.

To generate creative effects like isolating the subject of a photo from the foreground and background using focus, you need a DSLR with a large lens and large sensor. Would the photo of the Afghan Girl been so striking if the dirty wall of the refugee camp behind her had been in sharp focus?

You can simulate shallow depth of field in software by blurring portions of the photo. But this is usually just a guess based on location in the photo. e.g. Blur the bottom and top third, leave the middle third in focus. It ends up looking rather fake, which is bad unless fake is the effect you're trying to achieve. (That last one's a real scene, it just looks like a miniature because shallow depth of field is also characteristic of photographic miniatures. Your brain has seen it so often that it associates extreme shallow depth of field with miniatures.)

With a sensor which also captures 3D depth info, the sensor and lens size limitation is gone. You can perfectly blur the image in software to simulate any depth of field, from shallow, to deep. Even effects not possible with optical lenses, like non-linear depth of field, are possible. The only remaining reason to lug around huge DSLR lenses is for low-light photography with little noise.

Uh... no. I'm not saying no one uses those terms the way you define it, but "dynamic range" is pretty much the only term I've seen used for what you call exposure range.

For example, if I Google "dynamic range photo" (and in the interest of fully disclosing my methods, that's the first search term I tried), the first five results are:

"Overall, the dynamic range of a digital camera can therefore be described as the ratio of maximum light intensity measurable (at pixel saturation), to minimum light intensity measurable (above read-out noise)."
http://www.cambridgeincolour.c...

"In photography, dynamic range is the difference between the lightest light and darkest dark which can be seen in a photo."
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tec...

"The dynamic range of a sensor is defined by the largest possible signal divided by the smallest possible signal it can generate." This one is closer to your definition of dynamic range.
http://www.dpreview.com/glossa...

The wikipedia hit I get goes right to the HDR articles, which says "In photography, dynamic range is measured in EV differences (known as stops) between the brightest and darkest parts of the image that show detail." If you follow the link to the dynamic range article, you get "Photographers use "dynamic range" for the luminance range of a scene being photographed, or the limits of luminance range that a given digital camera or film can capture, or the opacity range of developed film images, or the reflectance range of images on photographic papers." (emphasis mine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

The fifth link, http://www.stuckincustoms.com/..., doesn't have any definition of dynamic range, and is basically an ad site.

So if I'm generous and count dpreview for you (and then count the fifth link as neutral), that's 1 out of 4 links that agree with you and 3 out of 4 that use "dynamic range" to mean what you call "exposure range".

It seems to me there is information there. A tiny particle blurs to 2 um. Hence it clear that you can't meaningfully distinguish between to particles less then roughly 1 um. http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm. However, if the particles are 4 um apart I can definitely distinguish them. I am sure I can do this because if I look at the image present, the dot is blurred, meaning there are multiple pixel for the single spot. Sure it is possible the that the image is super zoomed up and what we are seeing is software smoothing of a single pixel or some kind of compression algorithm creating a false sense of resolution. To my eye this does not seem to be the case [yes, very subjective/speculative statement here]. Phone cameras are now boasting 41 MPixel chips http://www.nokia.com/us-en/phones/phone/lumia1020/specifications/ This is a lot higher spacial resolution than most scientific cameras used with fluorescent microscopes so it is not far fetched to expect camera resolution is not the limiting factor. So yes, there is a little bit of assumption that the people who built this thing knew a little bit about what they are doing and are purely "faking" it. With that in mind the basis for my claims is there in the article.

Of course the other post has plenty of hand waving. The only point of that is that there are reasons why the particular implementation may not be stupid, not that I know all the details of what was done.

Your brain fixes the colour cast from the ambient light, not the colour of the objects you're looking at. Does your office look like this? When you go outside does it look like this?

The corrected photos show that the landscape of Mars, at least in that location, isn't as red as photos usually show. Much of the redness comes from the light illuminating the scene - Mars' atmosphere filters out more blue light than ours does.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/forums/thread1259.htm
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/gimptutorials/tp/fake-adjustment-layers.htm

etc...

while probably not the be all and end all, there is a lot of stuff in a simple google search for "gimp adjustment layers"

what you're likely to find (when comparing any software) is that terminology may be different, and in FOSS sometimes ease-of-use for newbies isn't a criteria for developers (though an expert with gimp is likely more efficient than an expert with photoshop)

there is usually ways to achieve what you want with gimp though, you just have to be a bit smarter than most photoshop users

there are also a lot of gimp plugins that can help

Theoretically, the only real difference between a DSLR and a MILC (or whatever you want to call them) is that a DSLR has a mirror box and the MILC doesn't.

Just based that, the man does not know almost anything about photography and physics of light.

There are totally different visual results what is the size of the camera body, distance between focal point and sensor, sensor size, pixel size... etc. Below is the navigator for this thread, you can use this to view other messages in this thread. You can use the previous and next buttons to scroll through the messages in this thread. Or the 'Next New' button to jump to the next newly posted message.

Smaller cameras P'nP, Compacts and especially phones will never achieve the same technical possibilities for potraits, landscapes, macros and many many other situations than what DSLR's to Medium and Architecture cameras offers.

Example: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-sensor-size.htm
More from same site: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm

Theoretically, the only real difference between a DSLR and a MILC (or whatever you want to call them) is that a DSLR has a mirror box and the MILC doesn't.

Just based that, the man does not know almost anything about photography and physics of light.

There are totally different visual results what is the size of the camera body, distance between focal point and sensor, sensor size, pixel size... etc. Below is the navigator for this thread, you can use this to view other messages in this thread. You can use the previous and next buttons to scroll through the messages in this thread. Or the 'Next New' button to jump to the next newly posted message.

Smaller cameras P'nP, Compacts and especially phones will never achieve the same technical possibilities for potraits, landscapes, macros and many many other situations than what DSLR's to Medium and Architecture cameras offers.

Example: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-sensor-size.htm
More from same site: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm

I've been looking at ISO 12223 charts for Canon lenses for a while (that are published on The Digital Picture), and Canon certainly seems to be getting sharper with their newer lenses. The new TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II and the 70-200 f/2.8L IS II USM appear to be extremely sharp wide open. Don't know if you've had a chance to play with those but they look amazing. I agree that as megapixel counts go through the roof, we're going to start hitting diffraction limits that render the extra pixels worthless (more here for those who are interested).

P.S. Over the years I've seen many of your photos of the Bonneville Speed Week events, and really enjoy them. I've been meaning to get out there sometime to get some photos of my own. :^)

I'd bet that you could use that many megapixels to seriously boost dynamic range by averaging several adjacent pixels into one.

Simply put: no. Software "averaging" may smooth out noise, but it will not add information that was not present in the first place. Missing dynamic range at the hardware is just not there to be recovered in software. In digital camera sensors, dynamic range is limited by saturation of the sensor's photosites. Once a photosite has collected enough photons, it registers maximum charge -- information about any further photons collected at that photosite during the exposure is lost. In fact, adding more photosites per unit area increases the per-photosite noise and chip areal overhead. Noise reduces dynamic range at the low end, and less charge capacity per photosite reduces dynamic range at the high end.

As another poster notes, you might change the effective exposure received by each photosite (perhaps by Bayer-array like neutral-density filtering). Or you can do what Fuji did with the S3 pro: make a matrix of photosites of different sizes/sensitivites to improve dynamic range. Fuji's sensor, while nice, has hardly taken over the digital imaging world.

On a more constructive note, Ctein wrote up a nice exposition on The Online Photographer about both near-term sensor technologies entering production and long-term avenues for advancement in digital imaging technology.

With "liquid lenses" that are electronically reshaped on-demand and in real-time, we might see the day where every shot is technically dead-on sharp, almost to the limits of the laws of physics.

We hit the limits of the laws of physics decades ago. High-quality lenses have been diffraction limited since the mid-60s for non-zoom lenses, and since the late 90s for zoom lenses.

As an example, at an aperture of f/8, no lens, no matter how good, can project a point of light to cover less than nine pixels on the sensor described in the article. At f/22 (the standard for high depth-of-field photography), a point of light will cover approximately 65 pixels. At f/32 (needed to get a decent depth of field on a long telephoto lens), it'll cover about 133 pixels.

A more substantial problem is that diffraction limits the effective resolution of an optical system to well above the size of each of these pixels. This is a problem with current sensors at narrow apertures; lenses exhibit a measurable loss of sharpness, typically f/11 and up, because the airy disks expand as the aperture contracts. With hugely dense sensors like this, though... plugging some numbers into a website that explains the whole situation suggests that you'd need to shoot with apertures than f/1.8 to get circles of confusion smaller than the size of a single pixel.

That's right--even "fast" f/2.8 lenses are limited by physics to never being able to project detail onto individual pixels. You could potentially add a deconvolution stage in software to recover additional sharpness, but not in hardware.

Another thing. Do the math: the pixels are 2.1 micrometers square. Compare to trichromatic human vision, which detects red light peaking at 564 nanometers, 0.564 micrometers. The size of a pixel is within a factor of four of the wavelengths they measure. Staggering.

Glass isn't the problem. We need new laws of nature, since we're near the edges of the ones we have now.

OK, I'll bite. Even though I don't think Wikipedia is authoritative for anything, this entry contains a better reference list than I could include here. To summarize, depending on the film, the spacial resolution of 35mm film ranges from 4 to 20 megapixels, but moderately-priced DSLRs (i.e. bodies around $1,000) are typically only managing nominal rates of 14-15 (i.e. raw number of photo sensor sites). Even on those bodies, diffraction introduces blurriness that reduces the effective spacial resolution achieved (a full-frame sensor that has 15 million photo sites has an effective spacial resolution of only 14.2 megapixels, and it gets much worse with smaller sensors). Comparing the output sharpness of my 6 megapixel Nikon D50 DSLR vs. my 12 megapixel Canon PowerShot D10, the D50 images appear sharper despite having only half the absolute number of photo sensors.

In terms of dynamic range, film can typically handle 9-10 stops (again, determined by film and processing used), but even if your digital camera can capture 16 bits/pixel (which most can't, RAW is usually 12 bpp), when you actually go to display your image, it's typically an 8 bit format (JPEG, GIF, etc.), which has just 8 stops of range. Again, the digital format is hampered by the various algorithms used to compress data, reproduce on monitors, etc., so while the file format may be able to contain more stops, digital displays are rarely able to keep up. Compression algorithms, particularly in JPEG files, do horrible things to gradients, as well.

Grain is an issue with film, albeit one that's well understood by those using it for art/career. In film, you can select different films to utilize different grain patterns that compliment the subject at hand. The equivalent issue for digital is thermal noise, which has been much harder to deal with, aesthetically, since it can vary depending on color (i.e. some cameras have more chroma noise in the blue channel, etc.), quality, and consistency. Also, while I can switch grain pattern easily with film by putting in a different kind of film (cost: $5-10/roll), doing the same with digital thermal patterns means buying A WHOLE OTHER CAMERA (cost: hundreds or thousands of dollars).

Despite ALL that, I still shoot digital exclusively, and have done so for ten years, because the technological benefits (no quality degradation over time, no processing costs, archival storage capacity, shot capacity per unit of volume within a camera, etc.) outweigh the imaging/aesthetic benefits of film.

I showed you mine, now you show me yours. Where's YOUR data to back up your claim that "Digital beats film in every one of those characteristics"? Or are you just spouting off about the old farts and their antiquated ways without actually bothering to have any facts?

BP's credibility as a responsible energy corporation is at stake, and this photo indeed was intended to be a demonstration of BP's response to the oil disaster. Knowing that they'd go to such lengths (albeit haphazardly) to doctor--and subsequently lie about--the photos further damages that credibility. Oil spills are bad, but misinformation about them is no less destructive.

So I take it you think the scientists in "Climategate" who admitted to using "tricks" to massage data, and subsequently "lost" the data sets have severely damaged their credibility?

People are not perfect. When judging them, you have to allow some tolerance for mistakes and bad judgment before deciding that they're deliberately trying to mislead you.

As for the latter photo, the human eye has a much greater dynamic range than any camera. Adjusting the brightness of light and dark areas so they're more visible makes the picture more like how it appears to the eye in real life, not less. All photographers tweak this when needed. All of them. In fact the best pro photographers are frequently the best because they can eyeball a scene and know how to set the exposure and use reflectors/fill flash to preserve as much detail for later tweaking (no blown highlights or unrecoverable shadows).

This type of post-processsing was programmed into the machines which printed the negatives of the photos you took of your vacation (back when people used film cameras). Yeah, none of those photos are true to what your camera recorded. If you're shooting your digital camera on auto mode, its computer is probably doing this sort of adjustment automatically too (tweaking the shape of the brightness histogram to enhance contrast). The only time you don't want to do this type of editing is for law enforcement or scientific applications (e.g. Mars rover photos), where the raw luminance values may contain meaningful scientific data or constitute evidence. BP doing it for a publicity photo is a complete non-story.

Camera sensor size is much more important than megapixels for how many photons you can actually capture. More megapixels on the same size sensor can actually lead to reduced quality and increased noise. Likewise, sensor type affects quality. The iPhone 4G has a back-illuminated sensor -- which means the photons do not have to travel through the wiring layers on the silicon. This means more photons captures and better image quality and better low-light sensitivity.

I realize that it's limited in comparison

I would like to know what the currently missing features are. When this has come up previously people have mentioned colour separation (there is now a plugin for that), bit depth (still a problem:, but you could use the CinePaint fork), adjustment layers (does this address it: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/forums/thread1259.htm?), colour management (I assume there are specific missing features within this, as the GIMP has colour management) and the lack of Panatone colours (no FOSS software will ever have that because of the licensing fee).

What else is still missing?

Its a pity Cinepaint development seems to have slowed: if it got a bit more resources we would have a FOSS competitor that had a sufficient colour depth and a name taht is nt an embarrassment.

The bigger the sensor, the more light that hits it. That, among other things, means the signal per pixel is stronger and thus there should be less noise in the image, all other factors being equal.

Some science for you.

It's 2008, why don't people know that every freaking digital camera sensor in the solar system is black and white with special filters in front? I mean, digital cameras have been around since the 1970s, so it's not like the technology is so new that people are still mystified by it, is it?

Do you know how your spare Canon camera works...? You guessed it, by having a monochrome sensor with appropriate filters in front of certain elements. The cameras on the lander will no doubt out-perform your canon in terms of sensor quality, lens quality, focal range, etc. The only advantage the Canon might have is in the number of megapixels.

The point is, a pixel is NOT used in at least two different fields (camera sensors, and LCD displays) as the ultimate unit of color display, so they are going to have a hard time arging this silliness in court. If you really care about the difference between spatial dithering, temporial dithering, etc., you should have known this before you bought a tool to help you work with it.

From my experience, Nikon fanboys are just as bad as Canon fanboys. Most of the Canon guys I know (via the POTN forums) aren't rabid Canon fans - they realise that the camera is simply a tool to get the job done.

I personally prefer the ergonomics of the Canon cameras, they just make more sense to me. That doesn't mean to say that Nikon's ergonomics are bad, they're just not my cuppa tea. In terms of AF, Canon wins, hands down. There's a reason why sports photographers predominantly use a Canon DSLR - as high as 90%. Look at major sporting events you'll see a never ending see of Canon L series lenses, and very few from camera/lenses from other manufacturers. Wildlife photography seems to be pretty even. Most fashion/model photographers seem to prefer Nikons, probably cos the Nikon flash system and metering system is better than Canon's offerings, although with e-ttl II and flash metering to suit, Canon has caught up a fair bit I personally believe.

Lenses - they're pretty even, although each side has some stunners that the other doesn't match. Canon's 70-200 f2.8 (both non IS and IS), and 300mm f2.8 IS lenses are probably the best in their respective fields. Canon's 400mm f2.8 IS and 600mm f4 IS are both just as good optically as their Nikon equivalents, and I believe both are cheaper to boot. I really haven't used Canon's wide angles (at least their primes), I have an older 20-35 f2.8 L series lens, which I think is reasonably good. I haven't tried any of Nikon's wide angle primes.

Canon's market share is dwindling, and this isn't because of the others catching up I might add. Canon has sat on its ass for the past 2 years, releasing a 30D, which at best is a point update to the 20D, and the 400D, again a minor update. Nothing truly innovative. The only true innovative release is the 5D, stunning images, stunning noise performance (but AF is so-so in all honesty and build quality is so-so). Canon is doing what Nvidia did - it has plenty up its sleeves and its only doing just enough to keep the market share. I personally hate this type of marketing behaviour, as its bad for the customer.

In general, Canon's CMOS sensors are better than Nikon's, but the gap has closed. Typically, the Canon sensor has bettered the opposition in resolution (it's not all about the number of pixels you know), and noise performance. With the D80, Nikon has caught up, and in all honesty, I think surpassed Canon's efforts with the 400D, which is very interesting. From a technology point of view, CMOS is always going to offer a better noise performance, and also a better usage performance from batteries. If you check the pixel peeping tests over at dpreview, you'll see that Canon/Nikon are very close now with the 400D/D80 respectively. Note that the D80 is around $200 more expensive than the Canon.

My personal thoughts on the top end cameras, is that the 1Ds Mark II is probably the best DSLR on the market, but I do feel that it has too many pixels. The laws of physics don't change, not even for Canon, and with 16mp on a full frame sensor, you're hitting diffraction issues at f5.6-f8. A good page on diffraction in DSLRs is:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffrac tion-photography.htm

Nikon's D2X hits diffraction issues at f5.6! We've become so enamoured of the megapixel race that we've forgot that there's more to it than just the number count. Sure, you can pack in more pixels, but then you seriously start to lose resolution. The D200 is a very nice camera, excellent value for money as well. Either way, Canon/Nikon you can't really go wrong, as long as your competent with the camera.

I do wholeheartedly agree with you that both systems are very competitive, it all evens out. A good photographer will take great images with either system.

I will take issue with your comment that Nikon's macro lenses are better than Canons. The 100mm f2.8 is one of

They sound crazy to me. I

n the first place, I seriously doubt that there's any meaningful way of measuring the "percentage coverage" of a gamut of colors, since the mapping of colors into a plane is somewhat arbitrary and there are two very different systems in wide use. I notice that this comparison of Adobe RGB vs. sRGB doesn't try to estimate any "percentages."

Neither does Poynton's invaluable Color FAQ.

Second, if we're talking about something like "area included in the CIE xy plane by thus and such system of reproduction" as a percentage of "area included by the entire spectrum," I seriously doubt that you can get a number anything like 90% with only three primaries. You're still trying to approximate a blobby blunt shape with an inscribed triangle.

The article is so vague on details that it's not clear how many primary colors are used. If it uses six primaries instead of three, I'm prepared to believe it could give meaningfully better color than traditional systems. How important that is remains to be seen. HDTV gives obviously, dramatically better picture quality (in terms of resolution) than traditional TV, but it doesn't seem to be setting the world on fire.

The big question, of course, is where one would find program material encoded with more than three primaries; it would need to be specially recorded for this system (requiring new video, broadcast, and optical disk standards).

"Well, it probably captures what it is like in there..."
"...only cheap flourescents and an occasional CRT to for lighting."

Hence the concept of "white balance". Get this...it will SHIFT the way your digital camera perceives the color spectrum to accomodate for a strong color cast or lighting. Decent cameras do it automatically, probably better than 99% of digitals give you interior and exterior presets, and decent photo software can fix WB with a single click. It's a simple step that makes many poor photos suddenly look decent.

Not really sure where you were going with the strip club comment... :-/

-MJ

My 286 ran games with graphics better than 320x200.

So did my XT. With only 16 colors. The 256 colors was why everyone put up with such a low resolution.

It's a choice between 320x200 with no paging and 360x480 with paging. Huge, huge difference.

Not for learning. If you're learning how to write a video game the difference is: understandable and completely incomprehensible.

Have you ever tried teaching Java to someone who's never coded before? The whole class and main method confuse the hell out of them. All they want to do is complete a "Hello World" program. Yet you're already throwing meaningless concepts at them. Same thing with Mode X. It was completely irrelevant to teaching game programming of the time, and was only going to confuse the issue. The rest of the stuff was better learned elsewhere. For example, order the VESA specification, or pick up a book on the subject.

Mode X was dominant in the top-of-the-line PC games between 1992 and 1996 or so.

Ok, this is where we may get into a difference of opinion over what "Mode X" was. The Mode X features like fast scrolling and page flipping were fully available to the 320x200 mode. Many games claimed they were using Mode X because of this. In reality, many continued to use 320x200 because it provided a flat memory space inside 64K. That was a big deal in those days, as you just didn't have much memory for double buffering. If you could page-flip it instead, you could save yourself a complete secondary buffer. Thus there weren't many games that used Mode X resolutions. I know about Quake and Flashback. Doom, Wolf3D, and Commander Keen all used 320x200.

That's what LaMothe does throughout the book - "There's some other stuff you can do, but I'm not going to tell you how" (and often not even mentioning that there are much better options out there).

Because it was, again, irrelevent. He used up 800 pages just to get the reader up to speed. Stopping to cover every little optimization in existence would have been pointless. (And would make the book far more dated than it is in its current form.)

Actually, I have to wonder whether or not *you* know what antialiasing is. Seriously. Antialiasing does NOT only apply to 3d graphics; it applies to everything from lines via bresenham's algorithm to Wu antialiasing of sprites up to (yes, finally) 3d.

Umm, yeah. I'm well aware of what anti-aliasing is. I know the algorithm by heart. I also know that it's incredibly slow.

Ever see a sprite scale down and remain recognisable? That's antialiasing.

No, that's smooth scaling. (Usually accomplished through sub-sampling and interpolation.) Antialiasing is when you take another pass at the image and smooth out solid edges and remove artifacts.

And, yes, it was available on the Genesis (I can probably dig up an article for you)

You're on the hook and the clock is ticking. I need evidence to back up such a wild claim.

and done in the later Keen series games for special effects (I can probably find where in the book Abrash mentions that).

Go ahead and look that up as well. You'll find that you're confusing anti-aliasing with interpolation during scaling. The latter merely blurs the image due to a lack of information (and can even *cause* aliasing!), while the former intentionally adds image information in key areas to smooth seams between areas of high contrast.

Here's a nice introduction for you on both methods.

Depends on which algorithm to which you refer; line drawing was the original. He later described, using the exact same method (tracking remainders), algorithms for circles (also 1991) and filled solids (not sure when, but I think that was '92). It's all a progression on the same basic concept - use the remainder to determine how to weight the border colors.

1) Draw a line. 2) Draw a line that bends. 3) Draw sever