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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
$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
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!
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.