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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."
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
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
11*43+456^2
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."
oops, I hit "submit" instead of "preview". Here is my post correctly formatted.
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?
It is extremely rare for a CCD-based (or CMOS-based) digital camera to have no bad pixels. Most (if not all) digital cameras automatically cover the dead pixels through interpolation. And with 1.2 to 3.4 million pixels per image, you probably won't notice if a a small number of pixels are interpolated. If you wanted to purchase a 1 megapixel CCD with no bad pixels, expect to pay around $25,000. Nasa is developing a new type of CMOS based sensor, called APS (Active Pixel Sensor). Among other goals, it aims to increase the yield of perfect samples. See this page for more information.
- 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 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.
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.
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!
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