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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)."
A bigger problem then number of pixels is quality of glass. Lens of lowend digital cameras stink. Even on higher end digital SLR, the quality of your lens has a huge effect on the quality of the image. But this is nothing new to photography. My point is, more pixels won't help if you're still using cheap PS lens.
RZ
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!
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.
$1K for a digital SLR camera? More like $5K.
I don't have any idea why digital cameras that'll take my Nikon lenses are so ridiculously expensive. The reason I haven't bought a digital camera yet is that I can't stand the idea of spending more money on a camera which has the optics of a cheap compact camera than I did on my SLR camera. That and the very noticable artifacts present in most digital photographs (and the lack of being able to do things like leave the shutter open for long exposure shots).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Just how far do you take the vegan thing?
as far as i can without going completely crazy
"Strive to survive causing the least suffering possible"
thankfully it includes my own
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
It's pretty eye-opening if you think digital photography is getting close to film.
Depends on what you're calling 'film photography.' If you mean professionally prepared, then scanned 35mm slides, then no, digital cameras aren't quite there yet. But, if you're talking the average person who uses an automatic 35mm camera with average 35mm film and then takes it to the nearest 1-hour developer at the cost of $0.75 per picture, then yes, digital cameras have already far surpassed film in both quality and economics. Not to mention the fact that digital cameras, while not capturing quite as large a colorspace, are quite linear. IMO, color rendition is far superior to film with regards to capturing what our eyes see compared to the exaggerated colors that film often portrays. Yes, I know our eyes are logarithmic in color sensitivity, but that doesn't mean you want to compound this with non-linearities in film!
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!
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.
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!
Or RGB, or PNG, or RGB/LZ, or RLE, or one of the many other open formats out 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.