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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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0614/6312194a.htm
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.
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
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
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
I would love to have somthing like this for my trusty old Mikon F2, but this sure isn't it.
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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?
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
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
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?
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.
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
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."
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."
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.
Check out a high priced Nikon or Olympus camera, you will be surprised at the amount of control you will be afforded.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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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.
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!
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
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.
If you care about resolution and have the funds to consider hi-res digital alternatives, why are you even using 35mm? The film is thick, grainy (except at very low speeds), and the aspect ratio is goofy (it doesn't match standard print sizes at all). Contact prints are nearly inscrutable. Scratches and dust in printing become image wreckers quickly. Switch to large format, where contact prints are 4x5 and enlargements of 16x20 show no grain at all... then you'll really wonder when the digital revolution is going to catch up to analog.
Personally I think the film versus digital comparison is not really useful, since they are very different. What I'm waiting for is a digital Polaroid (a filmless camera), where you snap the shot and out spits a high resolution print.
I do not have a signature
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."
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'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.
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
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 $25K, then I'll start going digital.
And even then, I'm going to bet that blowing up a digital image to 8x10 (or larger) is still going to look more crappy than blowing up a film negative to 8x10 (or larger).
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
16777216 * 3 = 50331648 = 48MB
Now that's a lot of data to be transferring around. I assume that any devices using this new technology will at least be transferring the photo data using USB or something...
BTW 16.8 megapixels is most-likely a 4096x4096 image. WOW! You could zoom in over 5x before getting a pixel ratio of 1:1 with the image on an 800x600 display.
Hmmm imagine a beowu$%^#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