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Startup Claims 16.8M Pixel Camera Sensor
Reality Master 101 writes "ZDNet has an arti cle about a new start-up claiming they have a new CMOS-based sensor for digital cameras that produces 16.8 million pixels -- and cheaper than CCD, too. If you're like me and you've been disappointed with the performance of digital cameras compared to film, this sounds exciting! The only question is whether the color and shadow sensitivity will be as good as film, which has also been a limitation of digital cameras."
Take a look at the web site, it's http://www.foveon.net
For the record, I used to work for Synaptics, and was also a TA for Carver at Caltech in the early 1980s.
--j
I'm a nature photographer.
I currently own an Agfa E-photo 1200, and with a lens adaptor, you can screw what ever lens you would like on to it :) I haven't had a chance to try this... but from what I've read, it works wonderfully!
My other complaint about digital cameras, though, is the ever-so-steady hand that's needed for crisp pictures... time to buy a tri-pod...
Karnal
Yes, digital cameras count each color pixel as one pixel. But that doesn't mean they have 1/3 the resolution. What you get out of a digital camera is a high resolution b/w picture (close to the stated resolution of the camera) together with a low resolution color channel. This matches the characteristics of the human eye much better than what chemical processes give you.
If those same photographs were in digital format, no doubt they would have been erased the first time the photographers disk needed a little room.
You are right for now but will be wrong in the near future.
My father has every negative he ever shot over his more than 30-year career as a photojournalist. This is common. Most major newspapers have their negatives going back decades. Some have them going back nearly a century.
Unused digital images, however, most often aren't archived. At my newspaper, only digital images that are used in the paper or are thought to be of some lasting value are saved.
You're only half right as to the reason, however. It's not just disk space. There are only a few products on the market that are designed for the archiving of digital images on such a large scale and they aren't very good. The Associated Press (someone you'd expect to have their digital act together) was in the picture archive business for about a decade. They are now pulling out of the game for the most part.
We're looking at a few digital achive solutions and will probably buy this year. I doubt it's the best possible solution but it's as good as it gets for now. I suspect it'll be another five to ten years before someone develops a really good photo archive system.
Storing terabytes of images is trivial from a technical standpoint. Being able to search and index those same images is very difficult. So difficult, in fact, that one of the main reasons folks didn't go digital in the mid- to late-1990s was not because of the digital camera technology (which hasn't really advanced much at the high-end) but because of the lack of archive options.
[way off-topic] However, newspaper negatives, especially before the mid-1980s, weren't designed (actually, processed) for longevity. Often times negatives were used to make prints while they were still dripping with fixer. Some negatives were never washed. Prints needed on a tight deadline often weren't fixed more than ten or 20 seconds. They started fading the second they left the dark room. Newspaper negatives are not the best examples of proper photographic processing. While movie negatives will last a century because they were processed with exacting standards, I suspect that most newspaper negatives from the 1960s and 1970s will be in seriously bad health real soon now.
InitZero
(1): They are made in rather exotic processes incompatible with standard digital CMOS. That means the analog readout and the DSP have to be done in another chip, increasing system cost. This is the key problem.
(2): They require high voltage clocks to drive them and so dissipate large amounts of power in the clock drivers. This also tends to increase system cost.
On the other hand, CMOS image sensors can be fabricated in standard CMOS technology with the image sensor, signal conditioning, and image procession all on the same inexpensive chip. While performance isn't quite up to CCDs yet, the price/performance ratio is already far superior.
Complimetary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor
----------------
Have you read my journal today?
Besides, I'm not saying that CCD's are perfect. All I'm saying is that CCD and film resolutions aren't directly comparable. Unless you spend all your time imaging high contrast test targets, film resolution is not very relevant.
What kind of radio equipment would we be talking about here? Can they be built from consumer tems?
Possibly. Satellite dishes come to mind.
You need a timing reference between the dishes that's accurate to a small fraction of a cycle of the frequency you're looking at.
You might do a low-frequency radar image of the moon using GPS to synchronize your antennas.
But if you're playing that game you can go one better: The moon is very stiff. It doesn't change shape much over a few minutes - compared to radar frequencies. So put a few antennas at different latitudes to get a big north-south aperture and use the motion of the earth (which moves the antennas many hundreds of miles in an hour) to give you your east-west aperture.
Record the data on video tape or DVD and post-process it at your leisure.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you think the average consumer (and potential consumer digital camera buyer) is shooting velvia slide film, you might want to check to see what you are smoking....
Reversal film, as a niche product, always costs significantly more than color neg C41 developing, which is available at any consumer photoprocessing location.
And, as someone else pointed out, don't forget to differentiate between develop-only and develop-and-print, which is more expensive.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
You can add any amount of grain to your digital photos if you like it for artistic reasons, and end up with pictures that are just like those you get from film.
As far as cropping - I totally hear ya - I compose in the viewfinder as much as possible beforehand. I was actually talking about doing your own cropping in the darkroom, vs. an outside photofinisher where they just print what you give them.
I totally agree with your point though - under any given circumstance, I'd love to do a straight 4x5 contact print over any amount of 35mm cropping and enlarging...
My vote is for more coffee... Iitt wwoorrkkss ffoorr mmee,, aannyywwaayy.. :)
Keep in mind that the D30 (prosumer) is not a direct competitor to the D1 (pro). Canon has hinted that they will bring out a pro-model (EOS 1 based) digital SLR shortly. Whether or not it is CCD or CMOS remains to be seen, but it would be a large embarrasment to them if it was anything but the latter.
just my blog and pix
I work for one of the online photofinishers, and can assure you that you can now get silver halide prints from digital images at a very affordable price ($0.49 for a 4x6, $0.99 for a 5x7, $2.99 for an 8x10). It's a lot less hassle than printing at home on an inkjet, and the results aren't near-photo-quality, they are photo-quality (resolution, of course, is up to you). I personally have a 2 megapixel digital camera. With a few exceptions for special lighting conditions, my 4x6 and 5x7 prints are indistinguishable from film prints (unless you're an imaging expert :), and my 8x10s are damn good. 3 megapixel cameras are good enough that the general viewer can't tell they're from digital.
Obviously for professionals or serious artists (who may be professionals), higher resolution is important. But for consumers, we're quickly approaching the point where more pixels are just going to mean fewer images per storage card and longer upload times.
I guess a thoughtful response to a reasonable argument is a bit too much to ask from someone with an IQ that hovers just below room temperature.
Go there yourself of use the links in this: post to a NYT article and their home page which has a picture of the thing.
This is cool and will be cheap, but I don't think it's really as good as 35mm yet. Needs to be physically larger.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
yeah, you have to use slow-ass films to get good resolution. but for a lot of applications, this isn't a big deal -- I take a lot of pictures of outdoor scenes, and Velvia (ISO 50) works just fine for sizes up to 16x20ish. clearly large-format is superior, but not everyone wants to drag a large-format system with them. For outdoor photography, this is a serious issue -- the weight of a decent view camera with lenses, etc, is in the 50 lb.+ range; contrast this with a digital camera (or 35 mm, or even medium-format) system, and you might be willing to sacrifice some resolution to save your back.
the real advantage of large-format, IMHO, and the thing that will keep them around for the foreseeable future, is the perspective control they allow you. admittedly, tilt lenses exist for 35mm -- and I haven't tried them -- but they seem a poor substitute.
Just my 2 cents. :-) I do agree with you that the comparison between film & digital is usually pretty meaningless, unless you define a particular target usage; for the professional landscape photographer, who doesn't care about weight (because he has a llama to carry his gear or something -- I'm not even kidding about the llama, John Fielder does this) and doesn't have to pay for his own film, digital clearly loses to large format. For the amateur who shoots snapshots and posts one out of every ten on the Web, and ditches the rest, digital is easily the right way to go.
Did anyone notice that the specs show an ISO speed of 100? That'll make it way too slow most of the time. I don't think that 16Mpixel spec is all that impressive if it's only rated for ISO 100 - I'm fairly sure something like Velvia would be a lot better.
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
Notice how this camera has leasing options. "We can't reasonably expect you to pay $24,000 for part of a camera, but we'll let you use it for a while..."
-Daniel
The only question is whether portable storage technology--solid state or magnetic/optical/etc--will ever catch up to those kinds of requirements. Let's see, 16.8Mpixels * 3 bytes/pixel = 48MB per image, uncompressed. A 1GB IBM MicroDrive will hold 20 pictures. Forget any kind of solid state, it's out of its league here. I guess DVD-RAM will have to become cheap and small really soon. Or we have to get over our hangups with lossy compression and just accept it as a necessity.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
according to today's DP review, the Euro prices for the D30 are more like $2500 (I say, as I eye my checking account)... :)
just my blog and pix
Storing the data isn't too bad a problem. 2FPS is plenty for a surveillance camera, and the content is usually so static that frame-to-frame compression reduces the data volume by orders of magnitude. That 100MB/sec probably compresses down to under 1MB/sec at least (and probably much lower for really dull cam locations)so an 80GB drive can store at least a day. Some primitive analysis to produce a "highlights reel" would help even more.
Sure the low quality image is a big reason for staying away from digital cameras but the biggest reason, for me, is that I don't want an all in one, take our lens, here's a flash, we'll decide the shutter speed piece of crap. Then again, I haven't been out shopping lately...
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0614/6312194a.htm
Unfortuatley, this hits the nail on the head. My brand new Nikon 3.4 megapixel takes 4 pix on a 16 meg flash card. It takes almost a minute before all the info from the sensor is stored on the cards. I might as well get flash powder and a box camera -- the spontineity would be the same.
Until we get fast cheap flash memory or the IBM microdrive cheapens up, hi-res dig phtography sux. But oh, boy. the pix of my new son are TERRIFIC!!!
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
As I understand it, the major difference between CCD and film is that the former has a linear response to intensity (gamma of 1) while film is logarithmic (like your eyes). This accounts for the "harsher" quality of light in video.
Of course, you can fix this by post-processing, but to get the same detail-in-shadow, you really want to start with 12 or 16 bits-per-channel. That requires a more expensive ADC, more storage, and either longer exposures or a cooled detector. I guess another option would be to use a logarithmic ADC so your 8 bits are already scaled.
Yep!
Everyone should be able to enjoy #1!
Sig it.
just because something is "relegated to the sidelines as an obsolete tool," doesn't mean you couldn't use it if you wanted to.
just because it isn't mainstream, doesn't mean it's not worthwhile - and, even though it *is* mainstream, it still might be.
IBM makes little hard drives that have adapters for CompactFlash type II slots. They're made in 340meg, 512meg, and 1gig sizes (not sure if the latter two are available yet - if not, they will be soon). By the time these 16.8mp/si cameras are available (a year or so from now?), you'll definitely be able to get some big storage for them. I'd say, though, this spells the end of high-end cameras trying to get away with using SmartMedia or CF Type I slots.
Canon is set to release a digital EOS later this year, which takes all the normal EOS lenses. Finally, a competitor to the Nikon D1. Hopefully, it won't be as outrageously priced as the D1.
they don't take "standard" 35mm accessories... I'd love to see a company come out with a digital camera that could take some of the fancier lenses
Assuming I haven't been trolled, check out the Nikon D1. It does all of that you requested and feels like an F5. That it's only 2.74 megapixel is not really relevant to its target audience.
The newspaper I work for has all but stopped shooting film. As of more than a year ago, those folks in our remote offices stopped shooting film. Deadline sports and out-of-state assignments went digital shortly thereafter.
In the past couple months, we've bought two dozen D1s and should be all digital by the end of the year. If you live in a major market (over 500,000 people), chances are that most pictures in your newspaper were not shot on film.
I always hear that digital cameras don't have the resolution of quality of film. That is true and will be true for a long time (years if not another decade or so). Quality isn't always the deciding factor. For the news business, speed of turnaround is most important.
Any business in which the quality of the image is secondary to a need for quick turnaround and minimal cost (realtors, newspapers, insurance companies, etc.) will be digital this year if they aren't already. Further, catalogs and ads where the image quality is greatly important but the iamge size is small, will be digital.
InitZero
I hope that's a joke man. CMOS electronics have been around since the 60s and today dominate the landscape. When microsoft came up with that acro. for IBM/PCs Bipolar TTL was king. I guess that's why nobody thought it was such a bad idea.
Actually, (and I really don't want to start a flame war here), that's why I bought a Vectus S-1 APS SLR. I have a nice camera that takes pretty good pictures, and with a film scanner a get a lot better resolution than digital cameras currently offer. With APS cartridges, you also don't have to worry as much about dust on the negatives.
Even better, they also use the same body for a mid-range (~$2500) digital camera, so if that body ever gets to a stage that offers better than film quality I can use all the lenses I have now (22-80 zoom, 80-240 zoom, and also hopefully soon an 18mm) with the digital body. The lenses themselves are pretty good lenses (though slower than comparible canon/nikon lenses), and the whole system is a lot smaller/lighter than 35MM SLR's (plus it's all splashproof).
The main problem I have with digital cameras is that I have to be able to store a few hundred pictures pretty easily somehow. Even on short trips of a few days I use between ten and twenty rolls of 40 exp film. If I were travelling somewhere really exiting like Africa or Peru, or just an extended hiking trip anywhere, I'd sure what to have more than enough storage capability to burn through as many shots as I wanted. Sure you can delete pictures from a digital camera easily which you can't do with - but that would take some time, and also I really don't think you can make a very well informed choice about what to delete from the small postview screen beyond "my thumb was over half the picture".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree, we'll all miss the tricks you can do with analogue film... I for one miss analog special effects in movies. Give me the anamatronic movie creatures of the 80's over this CGI crap any day.
But still, I think digital film is the way of the future. I can't do exactly the same things in Photoshop that you can do in the darkroom, but I can do a lot more and I can do it faster and cheaper. And even though I just slagged off CGI in movies, it's really only been around for 2o years, and it's only been mainstream for about 10 years or so. Movies were like the original Star Wars were the culmination of 50 or 60 years of special effects. I can't wait to see what cGI looks like in 50 or 60 years. :-)
Also, digital media is a lot cheaper and more accessible. It will bring more people into the hobby/artform. Working with analogue film is kinda expensive, especially if you're developing it yourself. Digital film and cameras are more expensive in the short run than traditional cameras/film, but after you shoot the digital equivalent of 30-40 rolls of film the digital investment really pays for itself.
If you already have a computer, digital photography is pretty cheap and easy to get into. I never would have gotten into photography if it weren't for my trusy digital camera. :-)
Besides, don't underestimate the artistic possibilities that "free" digital film opens up. Most photographers will tell you... the secret to taking good pictures is to take a LOT of them. :-)
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Don't forget:
3. Higher qualiy pr0n for the (formerly) blind.
Actually, IIRC, carver mead was the guy talking about building a camera that split the image into three seperate CCDs, each one optimized to read a seperate color spectrum, using a prism. In this way you could theoretically have a 50.4 megapixel image.
just my blog and pix
Let's see... it only senses cameras?
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
1/2 the pixel depth? 16.8million pixels works out to about 3500x4650. You'd be hard pressed to get tons more information out of a 35mm negative then that. Maybe a little bit, but I wouldn't want to spend the money on a scan, not to mention the work you'd have to do taking the picture. I still say the real limitations are recycle time and sensitivity. Especially recylce time. How long would it take your average digital camera to store a 3500x4650 image and be ready for the next shot? 5-6 minutes? Don't miss the shot...that's why film is king for me right now.
Founder's Camp
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It would not diffuse/diffract as you say. You can very clearly see dust on a finished print.
Trust me, I'm a photographer. I know all too much about dust. ;>
Rockwell (best known for building the space shuttle) also is developing high end CMOS imaging sensors. For some interesting technical details, check out
Rockwell Science Center
What's the use for adding a compressed air intake or exhaust? I know not this TURBO! Is it a big fan for overclocking?
Actually, the higher end inkjet printers are pretty damn close. If the black ink were as glossy as the colors you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. I think that the one I'm refering to here cost about $300.
;).
... ;)
There are also other printer tech out there (albiet, very expensive ones) that allow you to print in very, very nice color. DyeSub printers do a pretty nice job. In fact, there are version of the dyesub out there that print on 3x5" paper that arn't too shabby and won't burn a huge hole in your wallet.
Silver Haylide (I know I spelt it wrong, deal with it) printers are just damn impressive. They're also damn expensive. We call it the BAP where I work at...Big Ass Printer. I think those are made to order
The photos look slightly smudged on lots of digital cameras because the images are saved using jpegs. The one I own looks that way as well, unless I save it as a tiff. The 5mb tiff image produced is sharp as hell -- no blurry edges. I can get maybe 10 of those on a 32mb compact flash card
There are also digital cameras out there that have attachments available. Albiet it's nothing super fancy like what you're talking about, but a wide angle/fisheye/telephoto lense can be added to the digital camera I own (Nikkon Coolpix 800).
a BEowulf cluster of these cameras taking pictures of the DecSS source code?
Which is exactly what I was referring to :)
-- Sig (120 chars) --
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
The artifacts are a result of heat on the CCDs introducing "hot pixels". Also, JPEG compression is also a factor in that. Admittedly, there are still some color fringing problems with high-contrast areas, although the D1 seems to have a good grasp of this problem in terms of fixing it...
As for interchangeable lenses, the Nikon D1 uses any of the Nikon AF lenses that are available. You will be able to use your N-60 lenses with the D1. Virtually ANY F-Mount lens ou can find, or so they say.
Canon has just release the EOS D-30 which is a digital SLR to compete with the Nikon D1
There are definitely a lot of things that can be improved with digital photography, but its getting there...
I would love to have somthing like this for my trusty old Mikon F2, but this sure isn't it.
--
Infuriate left and right
Yes, it takes about that many pixels to get all the information out of a 35mm negative, but the inference that a 35mm negative corresponds to a 10 megapixel digital photo is wrong.
Even with perfect negatives, as you increase scanning resultion beyond a certain point, you still get more information out of the negative, but you also image a lot of film artifacts (grain, etc.). In different words, even with ideal equipment and excellent film, only some specific images (contrast ranges, etc.) will give you that kind of resolution.
Film creates images by creating globs of silver or globs of color. That allows them to have high resolution, but if you look closely, the tonality goes because all you get is a randomly shaped glob. Digital cameras and scanners aren't subject to the same constraints as film. They actually measure a continuous range of intensities at every pixel and give you full tonality down to the pixel level.
I think that current 2-3 megapixel cameras are about equivalent to film-based photography with P/S cameras and "regular" film. And once you get beyond 4-6 megapixels, you are moving into territory that's better than 35mm ever was.
What are the chances of ONE of those going dead, like in a laptop screen? More importantly, what's the return policy on dead-pixels in a camera?
This is a link LAST YEAR from EE Times:
a rver+Mead&n=33586385&tid=0&url=http%3A%2F% 2Fwww%2Eeet%2Ecom%2Fstory%2FOEG19990708S0026&title =Carver+Mead+turns+eye+to+digital+camera +that+rivals+film
http://www.eoenabled.com/edtn/out.asp?a=EET&i=C
Carver Mead is no joke, and this stuff really does work. You get away with so many MPixels because it splits the light into R-G-B with a separate sensor for each.
Cmos censors are about 15 times less sensitive than ccd sensors. You will also see strange moving effects when tacking pictures of moving objects with an cmos sensor.
They are however much cheaper.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Howdy,
:) son. I could have never afforded this volume using traditional media. The vast majority of my sons photos are either viewed on the computer, or as 4x6 and wallets that I print out on my inkjet. For portraits photos we go to a studio.
I'll summarize IMO what you left out:
.Film costs money
.Processing costs money
.You can review and erase bad photos on the digi cam
.Digital cameras are usually used to replace point and shoot, not pro equipment. If you consider the typical quality of point and shoot photos, there is no reason not to use digital. The ease of access and simplicity of storage (just burn a CD) is far better than saving negatives and keeping photos in boxes (you did mention this).
.I have taken thousands of pictures of my new (well, not so new now
.I could use the excuse that I might take a great photo on digital and wish it was on film, but I might not have taken the photo in the first place if I had to pay for it.
mark stephens
I have always been disappointed by the resolution of digital cameras... that and how they don't take "standard" 35mm accessories...
I'd love to see a company come out with a digital camera that could take some of the fancier lenses that are available out there... who needs digital zoom when you can have the real thing!?
I remember hearing about a company that did "digital film" for 35mm cameras... but I haven't heard anything about them since... you could take this module and "load" it into a stock 35mm camera and start taking pictures... then when you had to "unload" you just plugged it into your computer and downloaded everything - anyone else remember that?
BlackNova Traders
I don't think technology is going to ever completely replace the quality of hand made works, especially in the arts. The finest quality home furniture is still hand made (read: good quality, minor imperfections that bring character to the work.) Sure, a lot of machinery is going into these works, but you have the hand sanding, the hand finishing, something I don't think that a machine can ever reproduce.
True, there is going to be a lot of decent quality work produced by machine, but the best is still hand made.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
...unless you mishandle the device.
How often do single transistors said aforementioned Pentium go TU? Not that often.
Electronics, treated well and well engineered, tend to outlast the span of time their useful life entails (witness I still have a perfectly functional 386, but no idea what I'd use it for).
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aris
11*43+456^2
However, I continue to use 35mm because:
The image quality is subjectively nicer, ignoring pixel counts. Digital photographs all seem to have artefacts - the photos all look slightly smudged.
I have not seen a digital camera that has interchangable lenses.
My Nikon N-60 with a couple of good lenses was cheaper to buy than most digital cameras.
Even if digital cameras become better than a reasonable SLR film camera, you still have the question of output. My inkjet printer cannot come close to matching a color print. That holds true regardless of the resolution of the digital camera.
Where digital cameras win out is when you don't actually ever want to print the photo - you want to use it on your website or email it to friends. You don't have to mess around with a scanner that way. But then, the sort of resolution they are talking about is kind of moot anyway!
Digital cameras will probably eventually supercede 35mm - but it will be a while yet. I've not seen an affordable printer that will print photos with the quality of a real photograph. And of course, if you compare this to medium format...well, there's no comparison!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I've got a brand new 80286-based motherboard - works great! Now, what I'd use it for, I'll never know... It's even one of those "turbo" models, at 12MHz. :)
On a more serious notes (Sorry, all you goat porn fans!) my room mate works in a professional photo lab and claims that the corner drug stores almost always screw up the color balance. The professional guys pay a lot more attention to it. Not something someone having their holiday snaps developed is going to worry about, but the professional photographers apparently use the professional labs (On the down side you'll end up paying a premium for the work they do.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
IMHO Vectus are just not good enough. What I mean is that it won't lure anyone who has already own a respectable system into using it. A bunch of zoom, the vary focal kind.
:)
The main thing of digital photo is that it just can't provide any decent and comparable priced 8X10 and bigger print. (I print mine all in 5X7, try to convince me feeling the moniotor screen is better than feeling the prints.) And I don't aware of a way to turn them into cheap slices.
If you can put up with the Vectus, you might as well buy a nikon top rate consumer level digicam and a good SLR (manual or auto) with some good prime lenses. Look at the Vectus lenses,
22-80mm f4-5.6
25-150mm f4.5-6.3
25-56mm 4-5.6
400 f8
50 f3.5
etc. etc.
Two words, painfully slow. How do you shoot with a tel lense _start_ with f6.3? While the 50mm prime is nice, it's 5 times more expensive than my Pentax 50mm 1.7 and 2 full stops slower. All those zooms start at f4.5, none of them can shoot at dim light without tripod. And the idea of tripod with the tiny Vectus is a contradition. And like you say, it desperately in need of a wide lense (18mm=24mm)
Besides, Vectus uses APS, which doesn't even have 800 film a year ago. SO there goes all your speed. I would wait for next generation $300 ish digicam that uses regular SLR lenses from the big fours. I heard Pentax is going to make a digital back too, which wouldn't be 2000+ pro grade. And frankly Kodak doesn't have big plan to move good digital printers to photo lab. Vectus is the 8-track
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If the next Star Wars is being shot all-digital, it may be at slightly lower resolution than this.
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Motion images are much more forgiving than still images. A single frame of a motion picture projected as a still image won't look real great to you.
The newspaper I work for has all but stopped shooting film. As of more than a year ago, those folks in our remote offices stopped shooting film. Deadline sports and out-of-state assignments went digital shortly thereafter.
This is potentially a shame. I heard a report on NPR and perhaps here on Slashdot some months ago about the switch to digital camera's by news agencies. The feeling at the time, and perhaps still now, is that many of the best photographs over the previous century have been bad photographs, but that in retrospect ended up being masterpeices. By having these photographs in hard-copy, they were preserved for future viewers. If those same photographs were in digital format, no doubt they would have been erased the first time the photographers disk needed a little room.
Damn I wish I could come up with a concrete example of a photograph that sat unused for many years. I know it is out there...
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The problem with CMOS sensors is their noise and limited sensitivity. Maybe those can be addressed, but until they are, many people will probably prefer CCD's. You only need very high resolution for very high blow-ups that people are going to press their noses against. For home and press uses, the primary drivers of digital photography, current CCD resolutions are more than adequate, and CCDs give you better quality and are usable under a wider range of lighting conditions.
I have a nit to pick:
- Film has a logarithmic response to exposure to light. CCDs and CMOS have a linear response. Therefore, the electronic devices will never be able to match the dynamic range of film, or at least not with a generous dose of innovation. This is very apparent when you light a scene for film, and then light another for video. Professional video cameras use a few tricks to approximate a log response, but the result is far less than perfect.
Film does not approach the dynamic range of high-end CCDs. The top flight CCDs have dynamic ranges on the order 5 orders of magnitude. Film does 3 at best. When I say top flight, though, I mean $100,000 CCDs.
CCDs certainly have a linear response, though if you really want one that is non-linear, that should be trivial to implement in software.
While I have no idea about an interferometer setup, it is quite possible to hook up a digital camera to a telescope and get some nice images of space. Check out this link (and the link referenced there) to see some.
Say hello to zMac.
Oh, come on. It was a joke (and partially funny, I might add)
I am personally (and professionally) excited about advances in digital imaging technology. It is a time honored passtime of taking pictures with film, taking it to the darkroom, and creating prints. I have spent a little bit of time in the darkroom. I, personally, would rather take my pictures, place them directly onto my computer (which can serve as an amazing archival/retrieval system), and chose those pictures I like most and either print them, or use some sort of special device that allows exposure from data to print paper.
From a professional standpoint, I am a developer on a system that does roadside vehicle emissions measurements, and we need a way to identify vehicles as they pass. The easiest way is to take a picture of the license plate of the car as it drives by at 60mph. What we are looking for is the ability to take a digital picture, and dump it onto a small computer quickly. We don't have the time (or the ability) to develop film, and NTSC is just too old of a standard for the resolution needs we have.
I am more excited about the future of imaging than I am about the past of photography. It may be a little bit sad to see old things relegated to the few hardcore fans, but the progress more than makes up for it in my mind.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
Some very excelent points, unforunatly you caught me on a morning when I actually feel like following up to a follow up...of my own no less.
..." since I most certinally have seen huge photographic portraits on display in peoples houses. But they are a far cry from the snapshot that most people associate with modern photography. Just like any easily accessibly media there is going to be a lot more fluff out there that was made possible by the lower cost of entry. And even so you can still today have a portrait comissioned in paint if you wish. And while the market for comissioned paintings is quite small compared to the market for photographic portraits the price difference still makes it possible for people to exist as professional painters today.
I guess I should have been more clear in my original reply. I agree that photography as a profession most certinally can suffer as did painting as a profession with the advent of photography.
However the fact stands that just as you pointed out yourself photos don't tend to receive the same quality of display as paintings do. I do disagree on the point of "... have you ever seen a huge photgraph of someone prominently displayed in someone's house? No,
But the changes to photography by the advent of digital photography are quite a far cry from the changes from painting to photography espically in how they affect the ability of a professional to change from one to the other.
When photography was making it's impact on painters making it much more difficult for them to support themselves through their art the cost of entry to photography was exceedingly high. Espcially since many painters had spent lifetimes aquiring the skills and tools necessary to make their craft possible. Early photography was not the point and click drop it off at the corner story that we see today and asking a painter to learn the new skills of photography while still trying to spend enough time painting to stay profitable is quite a tall order.
But moving from photography to digital photography is really much more of an extension. I would compare it more to moving from watercolor paints to oil based paints or from painting frescoes to painting on canvas. In both cases you're still using the same basic skill set with the same foundation only applying it differently. With digital photography and the computers of today there is very little extra knowledge needed to move from photography to digital photography. And as digital photography advances the ease of entry becomes even greater and the benefits of a firm foundation in tradional photography truely do help when moving into digital photography.
For joe-blow who's used to the 1 hour photo store on the corner the new complexity of digital photography may seem overwhelming. But coming from more or less a tradional photography background I can tell you very little of that added complexity is new to full time professional photographers. The only diffence is in how you can control the variables.
Besides who says photography is so set as to be a standard. Film stock has been advancing in quality at a rate that until the advent of the computer was practically unheard of. Look at photos taken 5 years apart and printed on current modern paper and you'll see a noticable increase in detail and acuity. And the same advances have been made in paper technology allowing tradional photography to continue improving the quality of image available. And that's just with current cemical processes, no one is to say what new materials may someday become availabe making film technology suddenly leap even further ahead.
Ok, I'm wanding pretty far off track. And since I'm debating someone who agrees with my feelings for the most part I'm felly pretty silly. So I'll cut myself off now and go do something productive instead.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Ahh...But, will you be able to print it? Or even view it in any reasonable way?
By now extracting the data correctly, you get a picture with half the resolution and double the dynamic range.
Resoluting now may seem like a precious ressource, but if you can have a 16 MegPix sensor, you can afford to use such a trickery.
Best of all, you can size the dynamic range fourfold by using 3 different grey filters.
If this stuff really works and nobody has thought about it before, I'd be happy to receive royalties... ;-))
Most companies digital camera-equipped with ccd
return policy is like this, minus legalese:
If you're certain your camera has a dead pixel on the ccd unit (not the lcd... we don't care about the lcd, but really sure it's the ccd) then we'll take the camera back and exchange you a new one.
If you think you've got pixels that are more sensitive than others, and when used to take demanding photos and get noise, we'll consider it.. but you better cross your fingers.
most *all* stores and web shops will exchange a camera with a dead pixel or stuck pixel on the ccd unit.
*some* stores and web shops will exchange a camera with hot pixels.
A host is a host from coast to coast
but no one uses a host that's close
How much discussion do you need before considering a thread relevant?
I have purchased an Olympus 450 Z and love it, I did have a nice Minolta 35mm and have since put it up in the closet. I would take pictures with it and get prints made, only to find out I really only like 6 out of 24 pictures that were taken. I also hated dealing with the idiot teenage "film technician" about pictures that looked like they were messed up during processing.
If you take the time and mess around with the configuration of the digicam most actually do take good pictures, mine is only a 1.3 megapixel and I think the quality is great.
you can buy film scanners (2700dpi) for under $500. and regular 35mm film cameras for much less.
it takes about 20minutes to develop (process) 35mm negs. these can be done at any local corner drugstore these days - typical cost is $2.50 for a roll of 36 negs.
when trying to decide if I should go all-digital, I compared the resolutions of digital and film/scanned and film/scanned still won. the only disadvantages are:
- you have to drive down to the drug store and wait 20mins to an hour for processing.
- negs still accumulate dust, scratches and fingerprints. especially at those drug store places, which usually employ folks who aren't as sensitive to your negs as you'd like them to be [grrr!]
otoh, as scanning gets better and better (like drum scanning), you can rescan your negs as the tech. improves. with digital shots, that's it - you're stuck with the current tech an no amount of postprocessing will create extra resolution. unlike film that does store more resolution than current scanners can extract.
so for me, its a no-brainer. I'm still using film and scanners to get .jpg shots out of my stills.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
That's interesting... True, I can see the interprolation hiding defects. So then the chip is not used on a 1-by-1 ratio, pixel for pixel?
You're going to have to go to some kind of disk memory instead of flash, that's for sure. There are currently two appropriate systems in use in marketed devices; the Sony system using 3 inch CD-R's and the IBM microdrive. The microdrive looks like a much more reasonable approach to me, especially because you're only going to be able to get about 5 completely uncompressed images on the 340 MB version (maybe 20-30 using reasonable compression levels).
It may turn out that the best approach is to give up on total compactness and just use a laptop harddrive. That would be out of the question as a built-in device, but you could probably work out a belt pack with batteries, a drive, and an embedded processor to run a 1384/Firewire/i-Link port. Not exactly cheap or compact, but it would give you a shitload of storage. Of course it wouldn't be limited to the market for this camera; you could also use it with other cameras or even portable MP3 players, PDA's, etc.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
they're late, low-tech (by today's standards) and did I mention its still vaporware?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
On a side note, have you considered the social ramifications of this "system" you are developing, and the serious potential for its abuse?
10mpixels is a little generous, much beyond 6 and you're mostly scanning film grain. Plus that's the film resolution, which is not the same as the resolution of your camera system seen as a whole. Any imprefections in your optics (eg focussing problems, lens MTF etc) will knock this right down.
Something that's not been mentioned is colour quality. Film has fundamental problems here, as the light for the blue-sensitive layer has to pass through two other filters first. These inter-image effects are very bad for colour fidelity. Digital generally uses mosaic sensors, and can give much lower colour errors as a result. jnd (just noticable difference) colour errors drop by about a factor of 5.
I think the clearest way to think about it is to compare camera systems in different market sectors: sub-$50, film wins. Around $500, digital wins. $1000 - $10000, film wins. $10000+, digital wins again (for still subjects).
I use mostly slow speed films, so grain isn't a huge concern except when making enlargements above say, 5x7 or 8x10. Film thickness is irrelevant to quality, as is aspect ratio - when do you print and not crop?
A digital "Polaroid" as you describe is no better than a real Polaroid! What's the purpose of having a digital process if you're only going to spit out an analog print? You can pop a memory stick or PCMCIA card into some of the newer printers out there - and receive a nice print in return, some of which are even dye-sub...
Lucky I didn't buy any Crap Coupled Device just now ;}
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Velvia and similar slow speed print and slide films are pretty darned good these days, short of printing posters - but I've seen quite a few 16x20s that are pretty sharp!
There is indeed a difference between the analog and digital photography realms, so a direct comparison isn't quite fair.
As for the tilt-and-shift lenses for 35mm - they do work pretty well! But overall, nothing quite beats a real bellows...
I don't believe this is true. each pixel is a discrete red,green or blue pixel. so the true resolution is actually 1/3 of what is stated since it takes a cluster of three pixels to form an rgb color-spot.
whereas on film, each 'pixel' (so to speak) contains full color and intensity values.
finally, film, up until you get very microscopic, is analog. you can zoom in and get more and more resolution, based on how good you can do the analog->digital conversion. obviously with a native digital format, what you shoot is what you get - and never any more.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
That should be FLA, 'less my math is off today.
When someone can come up with a 16.8Mpixel digital camera *body* that will let me use all my store-bought Canon lenses and costs less than $25K, then I'll start going digital.
Close but not enough. It's also very important to me that the digital body maintain a 1:1 magnification ratio with the current lenses. The current set of Nikon and Canon bodies that are close to the above specs have a ratio of about 1:1.4 which means that all of my wide angle lens (:-), but I'll be getting a 20-35 zoom soon) will suddenly move much closer to normal.
IMHO, one of the significant advantages of 35mm system cameras is a much wider range of lens viewing angles; moving either up or down in "negative" size reduces the available options considerably. If digital bodies for 35mm cameras throw away this advantage it will be very unfortunate and keep a lot of serious photographers in film longer.
You have a dizzying intelect
Duh, my Olympus 3030Z does overs/unders.
In a way, the same thing applies to electronic images as well. In low light conditions, CCDs are subject to noise, which actually looks an awful lot like grainy film.
Digital cameras and scanners aren't subject to the same constraints as film. They actually measure a continuous range of intensities at every pixel and give you full tonality down to the pixel level.
With scanners, yes that's true, since they have the same controlled lighting conditions for all images they record. For CCD cameras, however, that's not necessarily true, since CCDs become subject to noise in low light conditions, resulting in a lot of bogus pixels.
Free Hans!
Would whoever ran off with my Kodak DC215 at Defcon please return it? Thankyou.
"Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." - Hunter S. Thompson
But then you have jpeg compression to bring down the file size.
Plus, one of the main concerns is printed quality, not viewing on a monitor quality.
Perhaps it would make more sense to concentrate on reusable film designed specifically to be scanned once, and refreshed to its original state by heating, or exposure to a certain kind of light. I've certainly heard of optical memory that is supposed to work something like this.
Surely a one-row high-res scanning reader and a roll of chemical film is cheaper than a giant IC and several gigabytes of flash RAM.
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- Signal to Noise Ratio: The CMOS APS suffers from inferior SNR due to the fact that it must use a surface channel FET to "read out" the individual pixel. CCDs use only buried channels to transfer charge to the readout amp. One company (name fails me) has developed a CMOS "Active Column Sensor" that offers better SNR, but still not as good as a CCD. This property is very important for getting a good contrast in images that have both light and dark areas.
- Fill Factor: The photosensitive area of CCDs can cover 100% of the silicon, whereas in CMOS APS devices, some area of each pixel must be devoted to switching elements, resulting in less than a 100% fill factor.
- Pixel Size: This is related to fill factor. Since the switches can only get so small, the smaller your pixel size, the worse your fill factor. Thus, to maintain a reasonable fill factor (>50%), CMOS pixels have larger minimum pixel size than CCDs, about 18 microns, whereas CCDs are now sold with pixels as small as 6 microns.
- Modulation Transfer Function (MTF): This is a subtle concept, but anyone familiar with electronic filter design can relate to it - it's the transfer function of signal strength as a function of spatial frequency. In layman's terms, it's the ability of a camera to preserve the contrast in regular patterns (like stripes or arrays) imaged by the system. Fill factor comes into play again here - focal planes with less than 100% fill factors introduce aliasing into the MTF, amplifying weirdnesses like what happens when the sportscaster wears a plaid jacket...
Finally, there are some things that people don't take into account when they compare electronic sensors and film:
- Film has a logarithmic response to exposure to light. CCDs and CMOS have a linear response. Therefore, the electronic devices will never be able to match the dynamic range of film, or at least not with a generous dose of innovation. This is very apparent when you light a scene for film, and then light another for video. Professional video cameras use a few tricks to approximate a log response, but the result is far less than perfect.
- A close friend and colleague of mine worked on developing a 12 megapixel CCD intended for use in Cinematic cameras, going so far as fabricating and testing the device. When my friend's company showed the CCD to Dreamworks, the digital cinema folks weren't interested: they had determined that the needed resolution for acceptable cinema was only about 1280x1024 (I know the aspect ratio is wrong, but this is the example they gave). Thus, they weren't at all interested in a 3k x 4k CCD.
Counterintuitive, yes! But it becomes believeable when you remember the descriptions about how flaws and "noise" had to be added after early digital cinema trials resluted in audience dissatifaction about how the image looked too "perfect" or "fake."
One more thing of note: For the past couple of years, Sarnoff Labs and MIT Lincoln Labs have been working on CCDs built using CMOS foundries. MIT uses a SOI process that is very promising, and Sarnoff just uses a big giant P-well to build its CCD in. With these kind of devices, you can achieve same high levels of integration as a CMOS APS and still get the performance of CCDs. The only element that does not improve much is power. CCDs will always require a lot more power than CMOS APSes.
I can see the fnords!
Well, there's always putting the image back onto film. Digital film recorders have been out quite a while. Lasergraphics makes one.
At the high-end models, these film recorders have higher pixel/color resolution that a normal 35mm film.... Which means you can make negatives that are hard to identify as being computer-generated. (Oh the blackmail possibilities!)
I guess the question is whether the old process gives you different results than a new process. For example, there is no question that the death of the manual typewriter has caused novels to balloon in size due the ease of generating words. I think this is overall more positive, since an author can now concentrate on telling the "whole" story, rather than run into finger fatigue even though he/she may have more to say. On the other hand, they are more fat as well.
When it comes to film, I don't see anything film would give you that digital won't do, once the performance characteristics are solved.
I've had an ongoing project to scan all the photographs in my family's albums. The primary reason is for history. When there's only one copy of the prints, that means that they only are available to one branch of the family. Once they are digital, the life of them will expand immeasurably as they can be live on. Of course, there is still the question of storage lifetimes (I keep lots of backups and always keep them in "live" storage).
That's why I really want a digital camera with film performance. I would still like to create prints, but with proper attention, digital is forever.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Photography didn't make painting obsolete. Most people shoot pictures with their cameras, but there are still some people who make their pictures with oil-based paint and canvas. Likewise, digital photography might be the way most people take their snaps in the future, but unless digital cameras get much more sophisticated than they are now, there will be some things you can do with film that can't be duplicated with an image sensor. There will still be a place for film. (Try doing a timed exposure of the stars at night with a digital camera, or of a busy city street at night. You might be able to fake it by shooting video and mashing the frames together with some sort of algorithm, but it probably still wouldn't be the same as just leaving the shutter open for several seconds or minutes.)
In high-school photography class (about 13 or 14 years ago), I made a 35mm pinhole camera out of a small cardboard box, a chunk out of a pie pan, some construction paper and electrician's tape, and part of a toothbrush handle (for the film advance). I loaded it up with Ektachrome 400, shot some pictures around the school, and developed and mounted the film. Several frames actually turned out fairly well (properly lit and in usable focus), for having come from such crude technology. Try doing that with a sensor from a digital camera.
_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Actually, even more than that, most have 4 scanner pixels per image pixel. There are 2 greens for every red/blue set.
Luddite? :)
;). There probably is a subtle difference to the effect obtained with film as well, due to the nature of the media.
;). I'd be willing to wager more expensive models don't introduce that kind of noise either...$400 is near the bottom of the mid range for digital cameras these days.
Just a matter of personal preference. Doing things outside of Photoshop is probably alot more fun for you than it would be for me
There is one problem with long exposures (at least on my camera): They introduce noise. On my camera it isn't really noticable until you exceed 4 seconds, but if you hold the shudder open for 8 seconds there are several "specs" on the picture and it appears kind of grainy. But, the point is you can do it
Actually, what you would end up doing is sticking a PCMCIA hard drive into your camera like they do with high end digital cameras so you can just slide it directly into your PC. Unfortunatly, they aren't all that small.
The problem is that not even these hard drives can write data fast enough in raw form so you would end up with a 2 second lag time from the time you took the picture to the time it could actually be written to disk. There is also the problem with battery life when you are handling that much data.
Professional camera people want to be able to take several pictures with a very short delay between them, this means sticking a very large chunk of RAM into your camera to buffer it before it writes.
Compression is always a possibility, but the CPU might burn up the rest of your power compressing a 48 meg file in real time.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
True about the lens speeds (I said they were slow), but there are many other advantages of the Vectus system:
Mountains don't move often. Slow lenses are OK if you have a tripod and the right subject. I've not really felt limited by the lens speed apart from very dark conditions (and you are absolutley right that lack of 800 film is a real bother, though moreso is the lack of 50 - both are still true today). Actually, they do have a wide lens (18mm) - it's about $600, and meant for the people that use the digital body. I'm going to find out soon if it will work on the normal body. Also the lack of film speeds availiable is made up a little bit by being able to switch speeds mid roll, which I find handy.
Very light weight, and small. A tripod with the vectus is not a contradiction - you can either go super light weight and get a light tripod as well, which works fine. Or you can take all of that weight savings you get from the camera and put it into a monster rock-solid tripod. The small size means it's easy to travel with, and never ever leaves me while not being a burden.
Splashproof. You can shoot in the rain, and in fact it can take a QUICK dunking (trust me, I know from experience) without hurting your camera. Ever since I lost a camera to water while canyon hiking I vowed never to use anything less than a splashprrof camera, and that limits your choice to one SLR camera that I'm aware of.
So for me, Vectus is a great camera for hiking. Even if it turns out to be true that Vectus (Minolta) is the eight-track player of digital bodies (though that is a somewhat weak analogy - I just think they'll probably not end up at a good place on the price/performance curve or offer storage options I dislike) I still would rather get a whole different digital system that used lighter weight lenses.
If I have to drag around 35mm SLR lenses I might as well just take a 4x5 camera with a digital back and be done with it. That in fact is the next camera I'd like to own.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
-pf
Make affiliate bucks
One thing left out is the storage method. Flash memory is still expensive. It will come down in price over time as the volume increases but we are talking about some big files. Has anyome calculated the file size of one of these pictures? What is the color depth?
"Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Ben
I read in a photography magazine about 10 years ago that digital resolutions would have to be around 5400x3600 to equal the resolution obtained by the typical slide film. 19.4 million pixel resolution. The article also said that to equal the average print film would require a resolution of 6 million pixels. Can anyone speak to this? Just curious.
Right, the truth comes out! :-) That was more in line with what I expected. The problem, last I heard, can only be solved with cooling. The CCD's just flat out have some noise otherwise. I did look at some astrophotograhy rigs recently that ran pretty warm (O Celsius!) and was told they would still be quite dark.
I'm not saying the digital cams won't rock, just that they don't quite yet.
I'm pretty picking when it comes to imaging though.
Ahh but this could also usher in the FMD disk, a really cool technology about to be released. It has the ability to hold 4GB! on a 3cm disk! That could hold the files produced by this new interface. Find out more at C3D.com...
I am no graphics expert, but I have always been under the impression that a single pixel has 3 values, one each for r-g-b. Yet you say
each pixel is a discrete red,green or blue pixel
Are you talking bytes or pixels?
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Infuriate left and right
Of course, the resolution isn't really 1920x1080, it's half that, due to the 4:2:2 color sampling, where evey other pixel is just a black and white pixel with the same color sample repeated from the adjacent pixel. Plus, there will be MPEG-2 compression artifacts all over the place, due to the fact that the video data is heavily compressed in-camera in order to fit onto the tape.
SW Ep II is going to look like crap in terms of image quality. I just know they're going to put a little tag at the beginning of the movie that says something like "filmed in DIGITAL!", and everyone will cheer when they see it, but if they were to really be truthful, they should say "filmed in HDTV!" or even "filmed with a video camera!". I doubt anyone would cheer for that. The "D" word makes people lose their senses.
Free Hans!
The New York Times has an article (free reg. req.)that has a bit more info. It states that presently the sensor does only black and white pictures.
You seem to know these things, so I've one more question about the subject:
What kind of radio equipment would we be talking about here? Can they be built from consumer items?
Since the Moon is always facing us the same way, it makes no difference (I guess) where the stations are on Earth, as long as theyre results are coordinated via internet (perhaps) when data has been gathered. I think it would be nice to have such a project going on.
But I want grain!
I briefly worked as a tech for Carver Mead, the man behind Foveon
He is a Professor Emeritus at Caltech, where he was one of the many highly respected EE God's.One of Carver's best known works are his books on VLSI (published in the early days before some of us were even born.) and analog VLSI and neural systems.
His research group did some really interesting technology including silicon retina which simulated the eye's tendency to detect motions and edges.
Foveon products probably won't show up in your handheld cameras anytime soon. But for professional environments, it takes beautiful images that minimize image artifcats that are typically associated with digital imagers.
I have a confession - I really want a D1. I bought a film camera about a year ago. I intentionally selected a vendor (Nikon) which made digital cameras which could use the same lens. To understand why this matters, when you buy a nice camera, you invariably buy nice lenses. Individually, these may equal or exceed the price of the camera body. As a collection, your lenses are where you make the serious investment. You don't want to throw this away when you select a digital camera.
Why should I care about using these lenses? There is the obvious benefit of extending the range of digital cameras to encompass telephoto, macro, and wide angle subjects. You also benefit from sharper photos with less spherical aberration. Your existing or new filters can be reused.
You may say (as I did) that this is all nice, but at several thousand, the D1 had better offer some other benefits. It does. The electronics are also superior. For a review see http://www.charm.net/~mchaney/d1/index. html . To summarize this report, the D1 has far less image noise and better control over saturation. See the images in the review.
Before jumping into this market, a few important numbers (in US dollars). The D1 is now about 9 months old and cost about $5k. Cannon is scheduled to release a similar camera this fall for $3.5k. I anticipate that Nikon will be introducing a successor to their D1 at a lower price point in the next few months, though I haven't heard any specific rumors.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
As a photography major in college, I've been through this debate plenty of times.
1. Digital CCD's do not have the dynamic range of film. You will lose shadow and highlight detail. This does not matter for most studio shooting, since you have precise control over the lighting. However, almost all outdoor shooting and uncontrolled shooting LOVES high dynamic range.
2. Where do you think you're going to put all those ones and zeros? 16.8 million pixels in a single frame requires quite a bit of bandwidth in order to take a quick picture. You also need some place to store that picture. Going to store it on a little card? Not likely - at least not soon.
3. How do the CCD's respond to light and color? Photographers learn the way different films respond to color. Will the CCD yield a good looking shot?
Everything else in the process is taken care of. You can get digital images printed as regular color prints. (This has caused a bit of confusion in the art world.)
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
I recently purchased a Casio qv3000ex. It has an IBM 340meg microdrive. At 2048x1536 in uncompressed jpeg format, it stores 245 images. Includes software and a Usb cable to get them to your PC. Just came off a trip to Alaska, and it worked especially good outdoors.
.02
Just my
shadrack
You're not going to transfer the raw ~48MB images, any more than you transfer raw images with digital cameras now. The camera's CPU will do JPEG compression to shrink it to manageable size, though I'm not sure how much compression would be appropriate to use. (Even compressed, you'll still be storing and hauling a lot of data, so cameras for this resolution will presumably use disk-based storage and either USB or something faster like firewire.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
PhaseOne's PowerPhase FX has the highest resolution, at 10,500 x 12,600 pixels, file sizes from 380 M at 8 bit to 1 GB in 64 bit. That, plus the cost of the medium format camera gives you this choice: a house, or digital photography.
Oh wait, you said Pentium... Nevermind... ;>
I would say the answer to 1 would have to be 0, if you don't count "stripped" tech like the difference between a Celery and a Pentium. As for number 2, that's almost certainly a "maybe" - depends on which transistor. It could range from instant and total failure to random freezes or such... But then, how would you distinguish that from normal behavior? Heh.
on the D30 can be found here.
I'm assuming that there are red, green and blue sensors on the chip that together make up a single pixel.
What if the readout could be modified? Could we then have a 50.4 megapixel grayscale chip?
bullshit
+film costs +it costs me about 10 bucks to develop a roll of film @ riteaid
+you forgot that while scanning is good quality, YOU have to scan in all those images, crop the edges, remove artifacts, etc.. i don't know about you, at my hourly rate I would save money getting a digital camera after about one: buy film, get film developed, scan in 36 images session.
-Jon
this is my sig.
You missed one thing. Rolls of film also cost money, bringing you to about $5/roll to use/develop film.
... this means that I can PLAY with the camera without having to worry about how much that playtime is gonna cost me. If i want to take a picture of a freek'in lightbulb from various angles just to see how it'd turn out I can without having to think to myself "man, there's $5 down the tubes". Recently I made an attempt to capture lightning on "film" during a storm that had a TON of lightning flailing about. I took about 400 pictures with my camera. That would cost around $60 to do. Not a small amount of change by any means, and something I would not have attempted with a normal film camera.
;)).
Digital Cameras, to me, are great because of the
instant feedback -- I know how the picture I just took will look.
Not only that but there are no film costs
Of course, if I actually wanted to print those pictures out...well, then it's more expensive. (but of those 400 pictures, I got about 10 worth printing
Appearently you payed for prints to. $12 is a typical price for a 36 exp roll, and 72 4x6 prints. Tell them you don't want prints (come back latter to get the good ones printed), and you bring the price way down.
You can also devolpe them yourself, but unless you take a lot of pictures your not going to save money. (But you know it was done right)
I think I read somewhere that the defects (at least on LCDs) are made during manufacturing, and, under normal conditions, no more will form.
So, your PIII with the bad transistor would prolly never ship at all, if the failure was catastrophic enough to make the chip fail burn-in tests.
If the failure was intermittent, you'd prolly just blame the crashes on software...
--K
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1.) Higher quality pr0n. 2.) Sight for the blind???
Sig it.
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Be interesting to see if a peltier cooling type rigging would help that any....though I'm sure that'd devistate battery life.
Then again, you'd only have to use it to the extent needed for a specific length exposure...
Noise is always going to be something present when convering from an analog to digital media. It's just the way it works. As an interesting side note, if you get this "noise" on a long exposure, and resample the image so that you cut the size in half it is no longer visible; kinda like what you have to do when sampling sound and the like...you have to sample at 2x the frequency you really want to "hear" or it'll get lost.
I'll trade in my 35mm gear once digital cameras have serious resolution - something that can actually replace film. Sorry, but it's not there yet - but very, very close.
Unless he comes up with a cheaper way to store the data, the cost of the flash parts is going to keep these cameras out of my hands.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I don't think this is necessasarily true. A couple of things to consider: first, as storage options become ever cheaper, there will be fewer penalties to keeping these images around. Second, there's no telling when you might need an image anyway, or what you might want to use it for in the future - so, keeping it becomes a good way of ensuring that you have what you need. The more I think about this, the more I wonder why a photographer would afford their work any less care than they have with a non-digital medium. Amassing a collection of good pictures requires a serious investment, and I can't see a serious photographer just haphazardly chucking them for the convenience of a little more disk space. Once some of the newer storage formats become more widespread (like the writeable CD in Sony's latest Mavica), this won't even be an issue.
Keep in mind that is still only about 1/2 the pixel depth of a 35mm frame.
Plus it will probably still be a while before you can do things like long exposures, multiple exposures, over/unders and such with consumer digital equipment.
Awesome for taking snapshots I bet!
There's digital, with dead pixels - and analog, with dust. Both can be likened to each other in certain ways... Which is what I was kinda referring to.
If you have dust on the lens in either a digital or analog sense, then chances are it'll be blurred into oblivion and you'll never see it. If you have lots of dust - then your image will begin to suffer, but by and large, you'll never see a speck of dust on the lens. Even with a fisheye, which has HUGE DoF, it wouldn't really show up.
Then again, if you have a cornflake chillin' on that front lens element, you'll have issues... ;>
- But he was skeptical that a 16-megapixel CMOS chip would produce the same high-quality pictures as his company's forthcoming chip. "You are going to get better image quality out of a CCD than from CMOS," he said.
The X10 cameras exhibit this problem. They are very cheap, but they produce sub-par picture quality because they are CMOS based. So it seems that even though they may have the pixel count up, they would still need to work on the other problem with CMOS, the quality. If they don't I'm sure that the CCD models will still sell well, and that there will be a bunch of people buying these cameras getting annoyed at sales people: "You said it is XX megapixel like that one, but the pictures it takes are crap!"I'm not crazy Jack. Poor people are crazy. I'm eccentric. -Howard Payne
This is interesting. Which is better.
according to canon:
The CMOS technology has attracted attention for its lower power requirements, as well as its ability to integrate with image-processing circuits. However, several engineering obstacles remained-including problems with the precision of internal transistors that led to variable image precision-and few products were developed using this technology. However, Canon has now overcome these obstacles, and has succeeded in developing a large CMOS sensor.
i am so happy now...
we can expect even clearer jpegs from smut sites now?
This increased resolution is cool and all- but the capacity of flash memory vs. its price hasn't kept pace with the increasing size of images, and the power requirements drain our currenly weak battery technology. We need better batteries and larger memory storage to match these new cameras' power before they will be generally accepted.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
www.foveon.net has more info. They say the chip is a 22mm square. Now, that is much smaller than a 35mm piece of film. The actual pixel size is 0.18 microns. I'm not sure what the grain size of film is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually 16 Megapixels is excellent. I have a hi -res scanner (4000 dpi) and I usually can see grain or grain like artifacts in my scan. Each scan of 35 mm size is about 50-60 megs. I can print an 11x17 from 35 mm and its beautiful (epson 1270).
The main problems with this increased resolution are
1. memory useage
2. It takes time/ processing power to store/compress and image of that size. In the proffesional realm cameras that take 4+ frames per second with film will have that advantage (4 fps is not as fast as one thinks if shooting action. This is a minor point for point and shoots.
That being said I'm sticking with film, its archival (almost) and is good for storing. I scan what I want (2-10 shots per roll). I'll move to get a digital camera that takes my lenses and when ink-jet printers can produce a decent black and white print.
On your sidenote, it would probably be more appropriate to take this conversation offline, but we have considered the social ramifications of the system.
Bit of history, this technology exists already, but it is a very cruddy system developed by another company. The software is DOS based, and the data is basically stored in a flat-file that probably isn't tough to get into. The business model they used was to sell numbers of boxes to people. The data was theirs to do as they see fit, and huge abuses occured. In Taiwon, one group was falsifying over 50% of their data.
We will be doing things differently, with the intent of data integrity build in from the start. We are building a data handling system similiar to the chain-of-custody involved in drug testing. We plan not to stand behind data that we don't process and verify ourselves.
Beyond abuse issues, we still our developing our stand on Big Brother issues. In the end, however, it becomes a convenience for the public, rather than travelling to a centralized facility and paying $10 to have their emissions tested before they get their tabs.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
Nah - quality won't be any better, but you'll be able to see the low quality better...
Hopefully USB2 or firewire (preferably 1394b)...
hmmm....
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Is this 8-bits per color? 12-bit? What's the linearity like?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Perhaps the biggest limitation to digital photography is the method of output. Advances in image resolution have slowed down because the camera/ccd manufacturers have realized their target market generally can't afford the money for a decent printer. Even the "digital photography" printers leave a lot to be desired when compared to traditional prints. Until the cost of quality output devices comes down, advances in pixel resolution will be interesting, but not useful for the rest of us. Most people don't need that much resolution, anyway.
-Elodie Bouchez ate my balls-
Foveon Inc., a closely held company in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce Monday that it has set a new image standard for sensors constructed using a production process known as CMOS, for complementary metal oxide semiconductor.
CMOS? isn't that TLA already in use?
computer memory operating system?? i forget...
-Jon
this is my sig.
Same old argument and I'll give the same old rebuttal:
If technology really did replace the tradional meida that it augments thing would be very different. But time and history have shown that new technology never completely replaces older technology and there will always be people who embrace the older technology for a variety of reasons.
Looking back at the history of photography for instance there have been literally hundreds of processes that all result in what we would consider a "photographic image". But they all have pros and cons. Many of the earliest processes were incapable of creating the detail and control that is available to todays photographer, even though when they were first introduced painters were scared that they would be replaced by these automated machines. But today not only do we still see professional painters but we still see people using the "outdated" early photographic processes.
New technology very seldom replaces the old technology that it grows from, instead people embrace new tools and widen their horizons and capabilities. If it was true that only the best solution would live on then today there would be no painters, and there would be no photographers working in alternative processes. But in the art world where aesthetics win out over practicality both of these are still thriving. And even if someday digital photography does reach a point where it is indistinguishable from tradional photography I guarante you there will still be people out there using wet plates and collodian processes just because the "like the look" that it gives.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
*i* need 16M pixels. in fact, i will not buy anything digital that has lower rez than 35 mm analog film. when i watch these pictures in 20 years, my display will have 600 dpi and all these 2M pixel pics will be stamp-sized.
i don't think a 600 dpi display is far fetched - the current 72 dpi looks horrible and the difference to a 300dpi display is plainly obvious - once you have seen it, you will not want to go back. we need at least a factor of 10 improvement over current display technologies to get anything near sufficient in terms of eye resolution.
until then, i will snap 35mm pics. i can then always scan them in later for a decent rez image.
you didn't understand me; I said (and meant) process only. ie, develop only - no prints.
and that should be implied as well - since we were talking about scanning the film.
I did leave out the issue of printing; but with the epson photo printers being so cheap and so good, I see no reason (other than saving time) why a computer geek would have chemical prints done; home scanning and printing allows SO much more control.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
two questions:
1 - how many transistors on a PIII are dead?
2 - does the PIII still work when a transistor goes belly up?
if the answer to 2 is no, then the answer to 1 is almost never. if the answer to 2 is yes, then how the heck does the PIII do that, or, will it become sentinent when the right transistors die?
Then I'll add something new to it that is frequently ignored:
The art of painting did indeed suffer. Significantly. The commonly held misconception that classic painting changed beginning in the late 19th century due to new schoools of theory like Cubism is only half the story.
Yes, the development of "modern" art did significantly change how many viewed and approached painting, but what happened to all the portrait painters? Did they all suddenly decide that what they were doing was inferior to abstract expression and change? No, they became obsolete with the explosion of photography, their services called on with decreasing frequency until they were just a footnote. What they did could now be done quicker and easier with a camera.
So, as a result of this, painting became an art almost exclusively reduced to expression that could ONLY be done in that medium. The same will happen with photography. This is progress, and for the most part it is good.
BUT... have you ever seen a huge photgraph of someone prominently displayed in someone's house? No, because photos lack a quality that makes them enjoyable on such a large scale the way a painted portrait does. Photos are relegated to smaller displays, frequently jammed into books that no one ever looks at.
Now, with the advent of practical digital photography, I fear that pictures will lose even more holding power for us. Instead of a few small ones framed on walls and a pile jammed into albums, they will all be stored as bits, requiring more work to be viewed and becoming even less a part of our daily lives. Yes, like now, the alternative will still be available, but not as readily and not to as many. This ubiquity is what is being lost, and I don't think the replacement will posess everything it should.
You can buy CCD backs that fit your Hasselblad/Bronica/Mamiya or even 4x5 system, but even next to 'blad lenses, they're still expensive.
What's a sig?
true - your time is worth something. but if we're talking about hobbies here, your time is voluntary - like the time it took to snap the picture, etc.
and if we're talking about pro, no serious pro would get prints made - he'd do it himself. or go to a real pro developer and that would cost quite a bit more than what we're talking about.
and still, the quality you get from doing your own scans and photoshoping (er, uhm, I mean gimping) will usually exceed all but the best pro setups.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I cannot choose the wine in front of you
I want a gmail account. Can someone help me
I've been disappointed with the quality of CMOS image sensors compared to CCD. They seem to be slower, produce somewhat distorted images, etc. Maybe it's just new technology, but I'd like to see sample untouched photos of moving objects outdoors.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
You can buy cameras that can use some real accessories. Just be prepared to spend a LOT of money.
Cameras, books, typewriters, etc... Yes, they all are (or soon will be) inferior to their technology-based replacements, but are we losing something important here?
I'm not being a luddite and trying to stop progress. As I said, this is inevitable. But I wonder what it will all mean in the long run when some of our most cherished means of expression are no longer directly tactile. When we are a few steps further removed from our creations, will we also be a few steps removed from the qualities we appreciate in them?
This appears to be an outgrowth of that work, using the analog VLSI techniques that were invinted for the retina project.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Right now I have a Sony DSC S50. Its not top of the range or anything, but it takes nice snaps and has very nice output IMHO. But I had to buy a 64M card to store enough images at full resolution to make it worth it. Now imagine that scaled up. The sony has 2.1 M pixels. So I'd need 8 times the storage capacity. That's a half a gig of RAM in a digital camera...
:-)
Of course the trade off is superb image quality (assuming that its actually any good) - as good as PCD format by the sounds of things. But I still think that anyone _that_ seriously into photography should probably be just using film in the first place
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
If Foveon can really produce these at half the price of current shittier transistors, I will be a buyer. I will have to see whether they are really 2.5x the transistors of a PIII when the retail version hits shelves.
I guess it is easy to do some advanced R&D when your sugar daddy is National Semiconductor...
"These are the days that must happen to you." -Walt Whitman
It's amazing what GOOGLE can find for you:
imagek makes the digital film for your 35mm camera... but alas, it's only 1.3M pixels... but you get to use some really nice cameras as digital cameras then... in the mean-time, there is still my $65 scanner... and it's 4800 dpi...
BlackNova Traders
Well, it just sounds great. I had a bunch of goofy questions at the onset but a little thinking through eliminated them (won't sharing them choke bandwidth, most monitors will not show a difference, etc.).
The bandwidth for sharing would not be a problem in web applications because the cluefull site builder will serve the version that fits the bandwidth for quick loading, i.e., measure the connection speed and send a lower resolution version to the client.
So with monitor resolution, people that have lower res monitors or printers will still get the same image quality that they are used to having, but they can see images in much better quality when they upgrade their equipment (assuming that they have the maximum quality file to begin with).
However, it seems that the number of pix that can be stored on whatever media is contained in the camera (portables) would have to decrease. Maybe this will be an excellent excuse for Sony to add larger CD-R disks to their cameras?
Idunno, I just think anything in this area is way cool and wish I had the spare bucks to snatch a few more items like this up when they are brand new!
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
An article in Sunday's Lexington Herald, unfortunately not available to me now, claimed that a software/hardware technique could double the effective resolution by using neighboring pixels. The author reported that this technique would be especially useful in areas of the image where contrast was low and/or the sensors were beyond their effective sensitivity.
I don't get much mail.
If you are like Intel you just disable the majority, call it an SX version and sell it for $50 instead of $60.
Could not resisit it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If your neighbor is black on one side, white on the other, then you should be grey...
If both neighbors are white/black, then you should be whatever they are.
Kind of like cubic interpolation in GIMP/Photoshop and kind of like what scanners and video cameras and such do now. Is this what you mean?
Your right about the resolution issue. The latest HD cameras are producing output that many think is better than film (HD = 1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels) and has to be downgraded with digital effects to give the final result a 'film' look.
Still if someone could come out with an HD quality camera at less than $5K (the cheapest currently around $48K with no lenses) it would be a boon for the independent film and prosumer market. Maybe there is hope for this new cmos stuff in that market.
LOL... I said the same thing, elsewhere! :)
I'm a photo hobbyist. I like to skip around town taking pictures... basically of everything. I just picked up a Ricoh 5300 Digital Camera. It's 2.3 Megapixel, lens is F3.2-3.8, film speed equivalent to ISO 100.
To the layman, this means that I can take pretty nice, sharp pictures when outdoors, holding the camera still, and taking pictures of still subjects. Once I step indoors, basically I must use the flash, which results in very strong shadows... something that I always try to avoid. I rarely need any pictures larger than a 5x7 print.
A 2.3 Megapixel camera will result in reasonably sharp 5x7's. A 16 Megapixel will result in sharp 17x24 inch prints... I simply don't *need* that kind of size... I'd have to get a $5000 plotter that can print that at the cost of $50/print.
Some things that I'd like to see developed for digital cameras and sensors are:
1. Faster lenses (F 1.4 or 1.7),
2. Faster film speed equivalency (ASA 800 or higher)
Basically, this would help when trying to take pictures indoors, at nighttime/dusk, and of moving objects.
Can you make hight quality film, paper, and all the other things required to make photographs? One day, Kodak and others will stop making these things and your cameras will just be empty boxes and playthings of the rich.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Unless you spend $25K+ for a fully-digital film body, you still are stuck with whatever crappy lens comes on your digital camera.
Since I've spent ~$1500 on lenses, (which is nothing compared to what a professional photographer might spend...) there is no way I'm going to dump that investment down the toilet by buying a digital camera with a built-in 35-80mm "zoom" lens and that's it. I want to be able to use my 18mm wide-angle, my 300mm zoom and my 50mm macro that lets me get 4" from my subject and still get a good focus and a sharp photo.
When someone can come up with a 16.8Mpixel digital camera *body* that will let me use all my store-bought Canon lenses and costs less than $25K, then I'll start going digital.
And even then, I'm going to bet that blowing up a digital image to 8x10 (or larger) is still going to look more crappy than blowing up a film negative to 8x10 (or larger).
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Oh yeah - the little ones are really nice.
Canon has a site dedicated to PowerShot cams.
I was looking into those - really small, but on the pricey side. But if you look at their specs, they're not all that bad, really. The "Digital ELPH" is not as good as the S20, and is in fact, closer to the S10 in specs.
This is a great development - for professionals and serious photographers. The average consumer has no real need for 16.8 million pixels. A million or two is more than fine for taking photos of the dog and sending them to Aunt Rita. Plus, now you're working with some pretty huge files. If you've ever tried to edit a 4000 x 4000 image on your computer, you know what I mean. It would be nice -- and more relevant to the average consumer -- if this technology can be used to bring 1-2 million pixel cameras into the $200-300 range and be competitive with decent low-end 35mm film cameras.
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
16777216 * 3 = 50331648 = 48MB
Now that's a lot of data to be transferring around. I assume that any devices using this new technology will at least be transferring the photo data using USB or something...
BTW 16.8 megapixels is most-likely a 4096x4096 image. WOW! You could zoom in over 5x before getting a pixel ratio of 1:1 with the image on an 800x600 display.
Hmmm imagine a beowu$%^#5...NO CARRIER
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
hook up like 10 digital cameras or so into small telescopes and spread them along an area... then use some kind of interferometric whizzbang techniques to take lovely high-resolution images of the Moon? Can it be done?
Can't be done.
You have to preserve the phase information to pull off that trick, not just intensity. Easy with radio, difficult with optics, impossible with separate charge-storage sensors.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At 22mm x 22mm it sounds like a contender for conventional 24 x 35mm film.
Here is Foveon's press release.