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New Sensor Has Real Per-Pixel RGB Sensitivity
jonr writes: "Well, the holy grail of digital photography is finally found. A company named Foveon have developed a sensor that captures RGB colours on each pixel. So what you say? Well, for the past 30 years (or since the CCD was invented) we have been using CCD with with red, green & blue sensors (or cyan/magneta/yellow) and then used software to figure out the real colour. But Foveon is the first company to deliver RGB-in-each-pixel sensor.
For those of you who are not into digital imaging, this makes a lot of difference, it's would be just as revelutionary if somebody would make a flatscreen with a real colour pixels, instead of the RGB dots. dpreview.com has the scoop.
(No, it won't mean the death of film, but I suspect we'll see dramatic improvement in quality)."
You spend $3,000 on that Sony MiniDV camera with 3CCDs and it's quickly outdated.
No matter how many time I tell myself I'm over the fact that this will alway happen (stuff being outdated right after you buy it), the first thing that pops into my mind is "damn, if only I could have waited a little longer..."
Actually, this is very cool. Combine it with the depth capturing story we heard about earlier and hopefully dept projection and the future looks really really awesome!
So when a digital camera is said to have 3 mega-pixels, does that mean that it only has 1 million pixels for each color??? Thus, the actual resolution isn't 3 mega but 1 mega???
I can't wait until I can get this in something other than a $3,000 camera. The imagery I saw, even in jpeg format, was outstanding. Anyone wanna form a pool on when you can get a camera using this tech for $400? I say October, this year.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
More resolution, while nice, is not what digital photography primarily lacks. Light and shadow sensitivity is what really sucks with digital cameras. Film has a logarithmic sensitivity to light, while a digital sensor has a linear sensitivity.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of any technologies in development to give better light/shadow sensitivity.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Personally, this is major droll material for me. I hope this technology comes to the consumer level by the time i'm ready to dish out money for another digital...
According to this article it says the first camera with this new sensor will be Sigma's SD9 SLR digital camera. No details on when, how much, what features. Anyone have more info on when this will be available? domo
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Since most often colors on monitors are represented by RGB values which determine the color.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
i think !?
When I went vegan over 10 years ago I chose to give up my darkroom (paper & film contain gelatine). I've been waiting in earnest for the photographic digital revolution!
Hopefully this will bring down the price of decent digital SLR cameras. All the ones I like the look of are about $1k and I've got too many other things on the list without burning a grand on a camera (+ a decent sized IBM microdrive + lenses etc.etc.)
I wonder if this will bring other benefits like clarity & shutter speeds available.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
High-end digital imaging devices (mostly digital and analog video cameras, but perhaps some still cameras) have been using 3 CCD chips for a long time to achieve RGB values for each pixel. It's usually done with a prism system that splits the incoming light into different colors which then are registered on different CCD chips.
In 1-chip devices, color is acheived through a matrix of filters which covers the CCD chip, allowing only certain wavelengths of light to reach each pixel on the CCD.
It seems to me that what this will really do is give us smaller, higher quality imaging devices. Let's hope X10 doesn't launch a while new popunder campaign...
This wont see the light of day for 5+ years. And I just did the same thing with my GeForce2 Go for my laptop. The day I buy the laptop the GeForce4 Go comes out.
*huffs glue*
AHAHAHAHA!
So, what am I goind to do with a camera that can see things better than I can? Human eyes don't detect color and intensity on the same sensor. Is this going to help with telescopic photography? I don't understand :) Even if it made resolution sharper, or cameras smaller, I still don't see a point? Is it going to be used in medical devices? Still, fiber optics work just great. If the theatre has more problems with lighting and projecting than capturing. It won't make digital zoom a good idea.
All arguements of usefullness aside, I could have made that on my desk. Measure intensity at the top. An orange polarizer. Measure intensity again. A red polarizer. Measure intensity yet again. Subtract blue from red from orange to get yellow. Subtract orange from unpolarized to get blue.
Is it really that great of a technology? It's not really innovative. It's not even really useful. Do you really think CCD is the limiting factor of resolution of digital cameras? I'm still betting on memory, processor, and memory bandwidth to get the "shutter speed" down.
Karma Clown
It is a well-known property of silicon that light of different colors is absorbed at different depths in the silicon; blue light is absorbed near the surface, green light is absorbed farther down and red light is absorbed even deeper
Why couldn't this have been done before? Whats been the break through that has enabled this new development?
Or is it a case of no-one thinking of it before?
is better than just higher resolution. If you just keep uping the resolution of the cameras, you also need to up the memory or use some lossy compression. With this tech (if it proves to be cost effective), you can keep your images to a reasonable size and make them clearer and better suited to using in print.
I'll believe it when I see it. Maybe in 2005. Or 2020.
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
If anyone is interested how photography resolution compares to digital, I found a great link once about this: http://www.users.qwest.net/~rnclark/scandetail.htm
It's pretty eye-opening if you think digital photography is getting close to film.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
People will no longer be able to say "that's a really crappy picture of me, I actually look a lot like Ricky Martin's second cousin" anymore?
There's also a decent article on business2.com
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/print/0,165
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Porn will be 3x higher quality. Ya for better visual stimulation.
Dude, that would fry the flesh inside your nostrils.
Just surfing through the site ... it seems a little sparse on technical details. Could be a IP issue I guess. Just some things I was looking for:
... how much of the red penetrates, and are the ranges for the "bottom" colours as large as for the "top" colours?
... here, does this "layered" technology compensate for, or work against the focus shift between colours? (I think this could be quite a selling point)
:)
- Dynamic range: if the pixels are "layered", what is the impact on the dynmic range of the sensor? The way it is pictured, the red layer is at the bottom (I would have expected blue to penetrate the furthest, but there you go)
- Focus: depending on how thick the sensor is, this could cut both ways: as it is, if you're doing IR with chemical film, you need to take the shifted focus into account
All in all, though, it looks like *another* reason to postpone getting a D-cam, until cams with these babies come out
yes, we have no bananas
Please check out superconducting tunnel junction technology, which is the basis for detectors that can measure the frequency of impinging photons. No need for separate RGB pixels - stacked or not - because each pixel can determine the exact frequency or wavelength of each photon it detects. You can take a spectrum and create an image in one exposure with one detector, without using any diffraction gratings or RGB filters.
Edith Keeler Must Die
There are already some (very high-end) digital cameras using CMOS technology, and judging on the sample images I've seen, they are awesome. Take a look at the review of Canon's EOS-D30, for example.
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
Maybe now Canon will finally make a digital camera that can do a full 35mm size frame with the current EOS lenses. This would be excellent for such a product!
you were eating the film and paper, were you?
Business 2.0 has a easy to understand graphic that explains how this new technology works in their article on Foveon's new chip. http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,37797 ,FF.html
Harris - seeking knowledge of a higher form...
Due to the sensor thickness, is depth of field going to be restricted to smaller stops in order to have the entire thickness of the sensor in focus?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
I'm sure it was -thought of- before, just that the technological hurdles were too difficult/expensive to overcome. After all, stacking circuits vertically is difficult to do.
I don't know the specifics, but I can easily look at everything else in technology. Just about everything is -conceived of- before someone actually manages to -build it-, and build it -cheap enough-. That's the reality of engineering.
It does go the other way -- new technical capability can cause people to think of things they wouldn't have before -- but as you say, the already evident facts of the situation make that unlikely.
The enemies of Democracy are
What's frightening is that this is more insightful than the responses to a lot of my posts (I'll resist temptation to link a few recent responses...). :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Not all film contains gelatin (no e), a quick google search turned up which types have it and which don't. Apparently it's only in the best looking film.
On a side note, does this mean you don't support most photographers or (non-digital) movies?
It's not any more "full color" than other RGB cameras. They all, by definition, define a color by three values. There are many ways to caputre R, G, and B and this one's not revolutionary. Now I'd like to see a high speed, 2D spectral photometer. Now that's cool. It would measure "color" at each pixel in very small wavelength bandwidths, say 5 nm and give you the spectrum at each pixel. Now, that would be better than the human retina, but not even close to being better than the human end-to-end perception system.
Question though: Why does someone (Nikon) not produce a truly modular upgradable digital SLR camera?
The D1 is a step in the right direction, but it's too big and way too expensive.
CCD's should be replacable like film backs on film cameras, so that you don't have to throw the whole camera away, just replace your 3Mp back with an 8, then a 12 etc.
And interchangable lenses, preferably standard F mount, for Christ's sakes people. You can't do serious photography with crappy builtin zooms.
My dream camera would be an updated Nikon F3, but with upgradable digital backs, and an option for an LCD screen, but not built in.
This is very cool technology. So cool that the photodetector array must be cooled to "well below 1 degree Kelvin" in order to operate. This requires a liquid helium cryostat. So don't expect this to appear in pocket sized cameras any time soon. But it sounds great for astronomy.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
.. this is HDTV!!! It has better resolution than real life!
WOW. I worked on a project trying to do some pretty accurate work with digital cameras, and I can tell you this... Until you spend around $20,000US, you will not even get close to your original. Heres an example.
The subject is a GretagMacbeth color checker (a bunch of square swatches of color with a black boarder)
With a pro-sumer camera, say around 3k, the image overall looks OK, but zoom in to any "grayscale" swatch, and you'll see that the image is still very much little RGB dots blurred together, and your grey never has all the same RGB vales as a true grey should.
As you go up to the 20k price range, a variety of tech is used to get more accurate color. The best I have seen was a back for a large format camera (can't remember the name for the life of me) that, when used in a studio setting only, could capture exact grey values for each pixel. What this means, is that if you took the captured image in to Photoshop, with no image correction, and you used the eyedropper over a grey swatch, your RGB values would read (x , x , x) over the whole swatch without a hiccup (1 pixel sample).
The camera achieved this by physically moving the CCD array so that it took something like 3 or 4 shots of the image (hence needing to be in a studio set up).
Now, a single CCD camera setup that can be used in the field, probably generating the same results as above, is going to be HUGE.
I don't know the target price range to start, but cameras using this tech, if it lives up to its promises will be HUGE in the pro photo field. Capturing a more true color vs. totally interpolated has enormous impact on color correction and manipulation images. In my experience, images for lower end cameras don't always manipulate in ways you expect because of the interpolated nature.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
This thing could also make one heck of a nice nightvision system, if used properly... so we could all have nice color pictures at night, just like the military folks have had for a long time. (Green screens are just for the media to consume).
--Mike--
Wow I think this is great!
I think it will mean the death of film, and in the future, ENTIRE CITIES will be built around these.
Also, I just want to say that I think Slashdot is a great site. The news story submissions are always really cool, and I can get a lot of information here, that I can't get elsewhere.
Plus the reader commentary is second to none! Keep up the good work!
The film used in that review is slow expensive slide film. It's perfect for the kind of picture he uses for the example. But the average person uses something like Kodak Max 800, which is nowhere near this good in terms of grain.
Also, note that the digital camera tests are done off of a print, not off of reality: "The digital camera images were done by imaging a 30 x 39 inch print (from the large format)."
--Mike--
By appearances, this fellow figures that horses are being raised just to cut off their feet...
it's would be just as revelutionary if somebody would make a flatscreen with a real colour pixels, instead of the RGB dots
On a color liquid-crystal display, having the red, green, and blue dots side-by-side is actually better than having them in front of one another. The slight misregistration of side-by-side dots allows for text and line-art rendering with nearly three times the horizontal dot placement accuracy of traditional displays. See also these articles about sub-pixel rendering.
Will I retire or break 10K?
i think it involves living in boulder, colorado eating oats, and pretty much avoiding any kind of civilisation anywhere. vegans just don't respect the life cycle of animals.
Jealous because you lost your job to a better educated, more skilled foreigner who was able to learn in school because he didn't have to dodge bullets from other students' guns, given to them by overzealous Second Amendment-thumping legislators?
Go back to high school and get your GED--if, that is, you can spell that (which I doubt).
you would see that the technology talked about is available TODAY. so please shut the fuck up.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Yup. I own an account which recently crawled into the sunlight of positive karma, after sitting on the undercap of -25.
Spooging Cum-Wanker hit -28 once. This is the lowest karma score I know of.
This is nice, and should lower the cost of digital cameras while improving the quality. But what ever happened to JPEG2000? I thought we were going to get a lot more pictures on our FlashCards but as far as I know, no one is yet shipping a JPG2K-enabled camera.
Parallax and other artifacts cause headaches in all forms of digital processing... causing countless software algorithms to be written that bring things back *inline*. This should do away with much of error correction in imaging.
Even in areas where we do noise removal and color balancing by additive techniques (e.g., image white through rgb sensors... negate it and use that as a additive mask to remove dirt, flys, etc... from your lens as well as color correct by printing the output and again subtracting that from the original to find unbalance in guns) - this will greatly improve the errors that abound surrounding such subtractive and additive region processing.
This will also reduce geometric distortion that often affects sensors where the RG and B components are split out and each sent to a different sensor (assuming that their RGB masks in this sensor are layered properly).
Very good work.
If I'm right in my assumption, it should be possible to build an arbitrary stack of layers (with reduced efficiency) for any color ranges you care to deal with. It might be possible to make a camera that has a special layer to pick up the 700nm wavelength that chlorophyll absorbs line to determine plant health for use in agriculture.
I suppose it could be stacked the other way, but that would probably be a much larger engineering challenge.
--Mike--
The reality will be, assuming the price on these sensors is competitive, that manufacturers will run the same crummy resolution, because Joe Consumer is amazingly happy already with 35mm ASA 400 and 800 quality prints, which look terrible after a lifetime of ASA 25 & 64 film use, not to mention medium format, which is the only plausible choice for quality poster size prints.
It's a neat technology, but I'm underwhelmed until it translates into a high enough resolution sensor in a body I can use my existing glass on for a price comparable to buying a 35mm body. Granted, you get the luxury of instant feedback on your photo (though there are drawbacks, i.e. on how fast these hi-res images process in the camera see my webpage for SF Grand Prix pictures for further explanation and examples), film is still fast and affordable. All I really need is a better way to transfer negatives or slides to my PC. I have an HP photo/slide/negative scanner, but it's unimpressive.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I felt the sting of unrequited lust, and chose option 2. I can say that it's easy getting laid now, "Can I buy you a drink?" is often replied "I'd rather go over to your place for sex" in bars, as opposed to the "get the fuck away from me you mongoloid" I was accustomed to hearing. These rejections from women weren't completely rude, as I am mongoloid. Luckily, all the other fags in "Wink & Pucker", the gay bar I now frequent, find this a turn on. Something to do with molesting a poor mentally handicapped "straight boy" (hey, it gets me more action) I imagine. I would like to thank you for your post, as it has greatly improved my sex life and I am a much happier person now!
Aeeeeenggh! ayleeins! ayleeeeeeins! eeeeeeengr
Hey, Reality "Master,"
Are your parents members of the Socialist Party or something, and your Anne-Rynd-hero-worship, Capitalism-Uber-Alles, anyone-left-of-center-is-a-terrorist postings are your way of rebelling?
(The GPL Communist Boogeymen are after your money and your guns! RUN!!)
"The Reality Master is dedicated to viewing the world objectively; without emotionalism, wishful thinking, cynicism or silly prejudices. The pursuit of simple Truth."
Both Socialism and Libertarianism are both bad ideas, although Socialism is much more evil than Libertarianism. At least Libertarianism embraces freedom (just in the wrong ways).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
A few years ago Mead (of Foveon) was doing work at Caltech with subthreshold analog sensors that had logarithmic properties. I don't know if any of that research is still active. Search for "silicon retina" and "Mead" for info.
It goes in the wish list, along with my personal KiloWatt, and personal MegaWatt, and the 10k*10k pixel CCD camera.
--Mike--
The most important problem, IMO, is not how the sensor is constructed but the color resolution. 8 bits per color is not enough. Decent cameras work with more internally or with pseudo-logarithmic sensitivity, but the main problem that the final product has only 8 bits per color remains.
this makes a lot of difference, it's would be just as revelutionary if somebody would make a
revelutionary? Can't you at least run submissions through a spell checker?
Kent
"film and paper are MURDER!"
vegan (vee-ghin) n. 1. A vegetarian who eats plant products only, especially one who uses no products derived from animals, as fur or leather. 2. See hypocrite.
You might be interested in Fill Factory's goodies:
The FUGA is kinda cool in that it doesn't integrate like a CCD. It has no 'shutter time' and pixel values can be read on the fly.
The site has an excellent FAQ.
Blancmange
Actually there is a company producing a flat screen with lets call them nearly real color pixels. Rather than using filters in the panel they use extremely bright Red, Blue, and Green color LED's in the backlight. The image is then represented in a field seqntial fashion. The beauty is that each individual pixel is representing the full color, so you dont need silly and stupid gimmicks like cleartype.
Here's the link if anyone is interested:
LumiLeds
You just can't win...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Thanks for the Mirror of Metafilter.
geeks looking for the real scoopo should please see the source http://www.metafilter.com
The day I get a user account to troll slashdot, taco has won.
BOOBIES!
a quick google search
oh great, thanks for the tip
no google 10 years ago!
side note :
I don't support the exploitation of animals. Obviously the extreme is impossible. I used to be pretty radical about it, I've softened in my later years. I'll go watch a film but I won't make one. The distinctions get blurred and irrational. It's a somewhat irrational stance anyway. I obviously don't avoid the use of electrical transformers. I just do what feels right and these days don't get into people's faces aboutit.
but no meat, eggs, dairy, fish, wool, leather, gelatine, milk, honey and stuff like that.
http://www.milksucks.com
I started in the wake of the big African starvations because meat production wastes food & water that people could use. When British pop stars & tv programs were rasiing money for Ethiopia Britain was importing Ethiopian food and that turned my head a bit. The EEC destroys food to stabilise the economy and people go hungry. I dodn't feel it's right so I decided to do something and the first thing you need to change is yourself.
Ten years later here I am still vegan.
I can take the insults and what have you because there's only one way of life and that's your own!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Carver Mead (the driving force behind foveon) is one of the few true modern visionaries out there. He was not only the pioneer of AVLSI, and therefore responsible for the microchip boom in the 1970's, but also one of the first people to start seriously looking at making electronics more like biology.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
vegans just don't respect the life cycle of animals.
ok i'll bite
er, how is living in a crate part of the life cycle of a pig?
How is living 3 to a 2 foot cage the life cycle of a chicken?
Since when was having your children taken away unweaned and being drugged with hormones so you'll keep making milk part of the life cycle of a cow.
The trouble with country folk is they've lost touch with nature.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There are a couple of problems with logarithmic sensitivities in electronics- the little potential wells fill up too quickly. Make them too deep and they lose the low level light, make them too shallow and the electrons spill out.
Conventional AgX can capture around 14 stops of light (thats 2^14) - conventional paper can handle 8 stops or so... a typical scene has 2^11, give or take. Depends on the scene and the subject- obviously a shot of a barn with the door open in broad daylight is going to have a bit more range than a shot inside in a white room with light bouncing everywhere.
So, what you really want, is to have the SOFTWARE be cognizant of higher bitdepth images. When you have 8 bits to capture a 10 bit scene, information is lost. So you throw some out... and you end up with muddled highlights and muddled shadows, and something in the middle that looks decent.
Believe it or not, but alot of companies have spent alot of money trying to figure out the correct 'mental' representation of a greyscale- not even including colour. I'm partial to Kodak (I work there, but these views are mine).
I've worked with extended bit depth images quite a bit and know that there is none (read, big fat ZERO) ms support for anything over 8 bits.... in fact, ImageViewer simply locks up and crashes. So any sort of solution that gives you extended tonal rendering are going to have to be custom solutions... and that probably won't sit well with the average person- "what do you mean i have to process my pictures before I can view them?!?!? I'll just go buy another camera" etc etc. Even if the benefits are enormous, there is the simplicity factor that drives it.
I personally am interested in this sensor, but there seems to be the wrong website linked... which worries me...
Things like level/color balance/gamma adjustment (wanna bring out that shadow detail in an underexposed pic? whoops, jpeg destroyed all of it already, shit happens), sharpening and numerous other image editing techniques really make the compression artifacts visible where they originally were not...
The current leader is 16 megapixel made by Eastman Kodak, the sensor is 4080x4080 in a Bayer array, which means it has 16 million pixels. That creats an image that is 48 megabytes, or if you work in the raw mode 96 megabytes (since you need a 16bit dword to hold the 12 bit data).
Back in the late 1970s Carver Mead of CalTech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC computerized the design of integrated circuit chips. Before them chips were designed by mechanical drawing and hand-taped photo-masks. This often resulted in spaghetti-looking chip circuits. Mead & Conway reduced chip design to a hierachical set of physics and geometry issues, and wrote a compiler to issue these from higher level descriptions. Chip design was then transformed more-or-less into a computer language. People then added optimization and simulation-testing tools to further automate the process. It got so simple that chip design labs were offered in engineering colleges with same-semester turn-around. Some guy in my class twenty years ago designed a "homogeneous coordinate multiplier" which become the geometry engine of a startup called Silicon Graphics.
Easier post processing+ x the reslution for the same sensor density.
If you design your system to make the GretagMacbeth checker to look good, it will most likely make reality look bad.
;)
Personally, I prefer reality
I'm surprised that this story's been up for a couple hours and nobody's linked to a much more detailed piece of reporting about this technology that appeared in today's NY Times.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Theoretically some cameras split light onto 3 CCDs so the RGB component on each CCD is spacially equivalent. Some projectors merge 3 CRT's so the image projection for each component is spacially equivalent. The problem is these mechanisms aren't very heavily marketed for consumers. Foveon is the first to sell to consumers.
DP Review also has a look at some image quality of the sensor. VERY nice.
n x3 preview.asp
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0202/02021103foveo
yes, but if the sub-pixels were all real pixels it would be even better (no colour distortions).
Not only would cost three times more, but your text would be tiny because many existing applications are hard-coded to work at a specific DPI.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I thought tests show that most human are incapable of distinguishing more than 256 levels of a color... granted, making the level logarithmic rather than linear helps.
Humans are part of nature.
What humans do to other animals IS part of nature.
It might not be good, but that doesn't mean anything.
This is probably going to make manufacturing more expensive if anything because of the extra process steps and likely extra defects per sq. Although the samller die will keep costs from skyrocketing too much. I can't really say off the top of my head weather this will improve quality or not, alot will depend on the algorythm they've got adjusting their raw rgb data, 'cause I doubt it will be very clean or even strictly linear coming out of a stacked system like that.
What I'd like to see is a single sensor cell with detectors that can quantize the voltage and current seperately, so I is luminosity, and V is chromacity and 1\V is saturation. (of course those numbers might need some tweaking to make a good looking image, but you get the idea)
It might not be good, but that doesn't mean anything.
it means a great deal if you are the animal concerned
that's the point
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I work at a digital imaging company in Canada, and recently got the chance to assist on a photo shoot for the day. They pulled out this badboy and told me not to drop it. It was called the LightPhase CONTAX 645.
It was unbelievable the quality of images that were produced. We were outputing 20 to 25 meg files, at resolutions I could only dream of.
Using a very nice macro lense and a powerful lighting set up, we snapped our own facial blemishes and hair growths during lunch (photographers are very serious about their craft), and the results were unbelievable.
You could see 4 or 5 different colors within each hair strand.. It was like something out of national geographic. Except we we're just screwing around.
Anyways, the point is, The quality is already here, the only thing this technology can do that is helpful, is drop the price tag. I understand that the model I was handling was upwards of 50 grand canadian.
My real wish is that the technology gets adapted for video: even if the image would be an 1/8 of the resolution, it would be phenominal!
the article in NY Times states that the digital camera equiped with 3.3Mpixels using this technology is equivalent to something like 7.5Mpixels using the traditional technology. It's a good article anyway.
This is not vaporware at all. The sensors are manufactured by National Semi. The bodies are manufactured by Sigma, and you will be able to buy them for about $3000. This announcement comes from one of the pre-PMA announcements.
Among the other pre-PMA announcements, Fuji has a 6MP DSLR and 2 new 3MP cameras. Nikon has some marketing about something they're going to announce at PMA, and rumors are flying about Canon announcing a successor to the EOS D30.
The nicest thing about this new sensor is that there is no mistanking the resolution: 3.5MP That is 3.5 Million Red Sensors, 3.5 Million Green Sensors, and 3.5 Million Blue sensors. Not 3.5/4 Red, 3.5/2 Green, and 3.5/4 Blue like the rest.
35mm image to 40x60 print at 400dpi. You do the math on how many pixels that is the equivelant of... ;) (hint: you don't need the 35mm size in the calculation...)
I've been photographing with film for a few years now, and recently converted to digital. I had a Canon AE1 before and now own a Canon G1. The truth of the matter is, ultimately, the quality of a photograph is barely reliant on the camera, rather on the photographer him/herself.
Unless of course you're working with an extremely bad camera, but the technology that's out there today is very much capable of producing kick-ass prints on 8x10 paper.
I have a few shots that I find quite satisfying. Click here.
JP.
--- Worst tagline ever.
Sitting on the shelf behind me is a colour portrait of yours truly taken with a Foveon prototype at the Telecosm Conference in San Francisco late last year. It's a head-and-shoulders shot about 8 inches by 6 which rolled out of their high-end photo printer about thirty seconds after they took it.
:-)
I didn't brush my hair very well that day, and you can see every individual sticking-out hair reflecting the light. You can see the worry lines on my forehead, despite the fact that I'm only 23, and you can see the rest of the room reflected in my eyes.
It's amazing.
Gerv
I am the network administrator at the largest all-digital photography studio in the US. We were given one of Foveon's cameras on a trial basis a few months ago, as we didn't want to spend $22,000 on a camera we weren't sure about. The color, and sharpness blew our $35,000 custom Hasselblad/Kodak DCS ProBack cameras away. We're talking about professional digital cameras that take 60-megabyte raw files. At any rate, Foveon is actually getting out of the camera business to just make these CCDs for other manufacturers.
I don't know what exactly they've patented regarding "Variable Pixel Scale" technology, but it sounds like "binning" to me. We've been doing that in astronomy with CCDs for years. I can envision it now, a cease-and-desist next time I'm on Mauna Kea.
Yes and no. While 8 bits might be enough for displaying a final image, it definitely isn't for the preprocessing. Classic photography has what is called an "exposure window":
When making a positive from a negative, you can flexibly set the points of blackness/whiteness on the negative that should be the darkest/lightest point on your positive. This works because the negative film offers enough resolution for producing a naturally looking image even if you only take a part of its spectrum.
The digital image on your camera, however, can not be used like this. If you try pulling such an image from an 8-bit image, the result would look extremely unnatural. This is also the reason why good scanners have a resolution of 12 bits per color or more, professional negative scanners sometimes work with 14 bits.
You're incorrect. Check the Foveon web site. In conventinal sensors, as you say, the software has to guesstimate colors at boundaries because you can't sample the 'red' at the same point in the image that you sample the 'green'. With the X3 sensor, it appears that you get a simultanious reading of the color channels over the same parts of the image area. This means you avoid a lot of resolution-losing filtering in the color channel to avoid chroma aliasing, and at the same time perhaps improving light sensitivity.
I'm a nature photographer.
Have you heard of Pixim?
http://www.pixim.com/pt/pt_dps.htm
They are working on a new technology to replace CCD, to answer your question.
Claimed on their website: DPS technology, in contrast, intelligently combines both image capture and image processing into a single system, which allows for both design simplicity and improved image quality. By marrying the quality of CCDs, the low-cost, mass production capabilities of CMOS and the power of image processing in a single system, Pixim's DPS platform revolutionizes image-making in both video and still cameras.
From what I gather, it's a way of measuring light directly onto a chip, without having to go through the CCD process. Sounds good to me. Hopefully it will make it so digital cameras don't drink batteries :-)
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
So what you are saying is that all humans are animals, no better no worse. In that case, why can't we do medical experiments on live humans? Wouldn't that be just as "natural" as doing it on animals? Anti-animal people have to make up their minds, either animals are inferior to humans in every way or not.
With the new ZMAX stuff out, couldn't you get 3D images too?
Now THAT will be cool.
I'm a bit worried about how well this will differentiate colours - the colour filtering is pretty crude - i.e. how far the penetrates the silicon. Almost certainly this will be a mean-free-path like dependency - the amount of light penetrating to a given depth will drop exponentially with depth, but with a different characteristic length. (Substitute time for depth and you have the radioactive decay half-life situation.)
.8B + .5G + .2R
.16B + .25G + .16R
.032B + .125G + .128R
.800B .500G .200R
.192B .375G .288R
.008B .125G .512R
The situation is likely to be something like this: Each layer absorbs (and therefore counts) 80% of the blue light, 50% of the green light and 20% of the red light*. So if the incoming intensities are R, G and B then:
1st layer counts
2nd layer counts
3rd layer counts
So to disentagle the actual R, G, B values, it will be necessary to solve a set if simultaneous equations. This process will introduce substantial extra noise into the colour values.
(Another way of saying this is that the colour/response curves for each layer is quite broad.)
*This example is simpler than the real situation is likely to be, e.g. we can improve things if we make the 2nd layer twice as thick and the 3rd layer 'infinitely' thick, then we get:
Layer 1:
Layer 2:
Layer 3:
which gives better colour differentiation, but no matter what we do, it will always be a mixture in each layer.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Last time I looked at night vision was a few years back when I was in defense business. From the technology I have seen - photo-multipliers, there ain't no such thing as coloured night vision.
The majority of the human eye cells - rods are sensitive to gray scale info and only a small part - cones are sensitive to colour information.
What drugs are you smoking ? Can I have some ?
And yet you are willing to believe Bill Gates is a good person because hes idiotly showering money over Haiti (assuming he _really_ is doing that, you wouldnt believe how many people do fake charity for tax break reasons)
A much better use for those millions of dollars in charity would be to use them to lobby the 7 richest countries in the world and the world monetary fund into forgiving foreign debt for the poorest countries in the world.
Bono (from U2), another very rich guy, uses his charity money to this end (and also other intelligent charities like Amnesty International).
He also is a stuck up guy with debatable ammounts of talent and a schrewd (sp?) attitude towards business, just like Gates, but you dont see people comparing him with the devil, do you?
No sig for the moment.
how naiive! the medical world is ENTIRELY based on doing experiments on live humans. ALL surgery is experimental to one degree or another - there are no guarantees whatsoever. FWIW, I entirely agree with the vegan morality - as I do with Christian philosophy, if I weren't so lazy and weak I might do better at adhereing to them. Pigs and lambs taste wonderful, but I'll wager a 16 year old human female tastes better still. But I only nibble those...
That was classic intercourse!
-1 offtopic
It's called medium format.
It's been possible to get digital backs for medium format cameras for years now. You want digital...sure, no problem. You want film? Gimme 10sec to change backs and away we go.
Now granted, the price is kind of high, but the principle is there.
Format is not function.
If you don't understand the difference between colour space and format of the data, you really don't need to post a response to either this or the previously mentioned topic. Because you don't understand it, may I reccommend a book, Digital Encoding Solutions, available from Amazon for around $45.
> Well, for the past 30 years (or since the CCD was
> invented) we have been using CCD with with red,
> green & blue sensors (or cyan/magneta/yellow)
> and then used software to figure out the real colour.
Used software to figure out the real colour? What is that supposed to mean? Digital formats also store red, green and blue (or CMY, YUV, HLS, etc.) separately. And so do analog formats, for that matter. Colour does not vary linearly, so you'll always need at least 3 different components to define it.
The difference here is each pixel of these new sensors can read the 3 colour components, whereas normal CCDs must have 3 times as many pixels as the final image. Too many sensors too close together causes electric noise, which translates to image noise, so the best cameras use 3 separate CCDs (one for each component).
> this makes a lot of difference, it's would
> be just as revelutionary if somebody would
> make a flatscreen with a real colour pixels
Actually, no. It's a lot more "revelutionary" than that. People want big screens, so having 3 dots per pixel is no big deal (and current dots are small enough not to be noticed). People want *smaller* CCDs, so having 1 sensor instead of 3 is a big deal.
RMN
~~~
Using CMOS sensors, it is possible to get both linear and logarithmic responses from pixels, depending on your biasing conditions.
For a linear sensor, the photosite is generally a floating N+ diffusion, that makes up one side of an NMOS transistor. At reset, the voltage here is set to VDD. As incident light generates electron-hole pairs, the electrons are collected in the diffusion, lowering the voltage in a linear fashion, dependent upon the parasitic capacitance of the photosite. When the integration time is up, this charge/voltage is sampled, and you have a linear sensor.
For logarithmic response, the reset level of the photosite is actually even with the biasing of the gate to that transistor (minus the Vt, of course). Incident light generates electrons, and the transistor operates in the sub-threshold region, making the voltage at the photosite vary as the logarithm of the current being generated and flowing through the gate region. Sample that voltage, and tah-dah, you've got a logarithmic response to light.
I admit, this is much easier to understand with diagrams of the diffusions, so if you want, here is a pdf of a paper discussing a sensor that has combined linear-logarithmic response:
CMOS Active Pixel Sensor With Combined Linear and Logarithmic Mode Operation
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
They have patented this:
= PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =3&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1='5,965,875'&OS="5,96 5,875"&RS="5,965,875"
United States Patent number 5,965,875
"Color separation in an active pixel cell imaging array using a triple-well structure"
It's on uspto.gov here:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
> be just as revelutionary if somebody would make a flatscreen with a
:-)
> real colour pixels, instead of the RGB dots.
That would be a revolution indeed! All my monitors have colOR pixels
Haha! The Goatse hoax is a great idea. My favorite crapfloods are ASCII goatse and BankofAmerica_ATM. Trollaxor, Tasty Beef Jerky, and a ton of other trolls are also very funny. -1 is always funnier than any "beowulf cluster" shit that gets modded up to +5.
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Here the citation:
Full-color displays also require expensive red/green/blue filters made of dichromated gelatin--fish glue.
from A Bright Future for Displays - April 2001
Tastes Like Chicken
you plonker... this is a breakthrough that'll affect anyone who experiences visual-digital.
o ve on&sort=&allwords=on&detail=on
The door's been opened to a more realistic pixel interpretation that will become commonplace.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/search.asp?query=f