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Canon Mistakenly Announces 11-Megapixel Digital Camera
RichardtheSmith writes " PC Magazine just confirmed
that Canon
mistakenly announced a new 11-Megapixel digital camera that wasn't
supposed to be announced for another two weeks. This caused quite a
stir on the digital photography message boards like DPReview, where Canon
apparently tried to have all links to the press release taken down.
The PC Magazine article is here.
The original press release can be found here."
Why?!?!
CMOS sensors look much worse than CCDs, so even a 11.1MP CMOS sensor will likely look worse than a 3-4MP CCD.
Has there been some breakthrough in CMOS sensors?
I wonder if this is a strategy that can be employed to promote the product... naw.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Well, the next time I have $6k lying around and don't want to do things like buy cars or computers or tons of other cool stuff with it, I'll consider getting one of these.
This isn't really for the average layman, at least that is obvious. Is it only news on slashdot because some web author screwed up while he was proofing the draft? Mabye not. 11 megapixels is a huge jump (twice the current high-end professional ones).
The biggest question, however, is how many megapixels are needed before the quality is on par with analog cameras.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
Try scaling a photo up a bit, printing it to a decent printer, or doing any editing with photoshop/gimp and you'll really appreciate those 11MP.
I find that any resolution under 300dpi looks cheap, which is rarely the effect I'm trying to produce. Given that, a 2MP camera gives around 4"x4" which is or smaller than an ordinary photo.
This camera is a significant improvement, 11MP gives more like 10"^2, big enough for almost all uses.
FWIW, I'm still holding off buying a digital camera because my $300SLR is better than a $1000 digital camera. I can understand someone with a $2000SLR medium format camera saying much the same thing about this camera.
How about a tripod and an external trigger? _I_ might not have nerves of steel but that doesn't mean the camera has to move a millimeter.
There are times when you want a high quality camera and can't set up the shot, but they are probably the minority of cases.
You're right though, faster reading of the light would be very useful. It isn't like we need to wait for the film to develop anymore.
What most people don't realize is how important the optics are in a digital camera. When you have more than a couple of megapixels, the advantages of better lenses becomes starkly clear.
Having a high senstivity (higher ISO, such
as ISO 800 or ISO 1600), as seen in high end
digital cameras, lets you take picture under
even the most demanding light conditions.
Higher shutter speed (1/2000 or fasters) lets
you eliminate handshakes and take clear pictures
of action shots.
All this of course, requires that your lens passes
ample light, and produce low chromatic and spatial aberrations. A good SLR lens, though, we cost you more a thousand dollars.
Having said that, the advantages of greater pixel count scales the picture quality linearly given good enough optics.
Given that the camera was quoted as having "11.1 megapixel" resolution, and that the nominal aspect ratio of 35mm film is exactly 1.5:1, I'd guess that the pixel dimensions of an image from this camera are 4096x2688. (This works out to 11,010,048 pixels.)
To get as close as possible to 11.1 megapixels while retaining a nice horizontal dimension of 4096 pixels, the vertical dimension would have to be 2710 pixels. However, 2710 isn't a typical "round" binary number, so the actual dimension is likely to be 2688 (11.01 MP), 2752 (11.27 MP), or 2816 (11.53 MP).
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This will help editors a lot more, as cropping digitial images will be more forgiving. The full-frame CCD is the best feature, IMO [besides the 11MP], as it means a 24mm lens is really a 24mm. That's my biggest problem with the EOS-1D: all EOS lens are 1.4x their lens length on a 35mm camera. Great for zoom lens; sucks for wide angle shots.
My Daily photo website.
Of course, you have to divide those pixel numbers by 3 or 4 to get a useful pixel count. Camera makers like to count each color as a separate pixel. Tacky.
I'm waiting for Foveon technology to go mainstream. All the colors for each pixel are sensed at the same location, so you don't get color artifacts on sharp edges like you do with other digital cameras. So far, they only make super high end cameras, but I went to a talk by their CTO, and the device isn't inherently expensive if made in volume.
I think the issue you are having is more to do with your particular camera or camera model & lense than it is to do with the megapixel count.
I took these pictures of a laser I'm selling on eBay. Lasers are notoriously difficult photography cleanly without then photo editing them. I shot them with a Canon Powershot G2 4.0 megapixel camera and they look great.
Previously I had been shooting with a Canon Powershot Pro IS90 which did 2.6 MP. Even when shooting the G2 at lower resolutions the images are consistently better than the IS90. Why? Better lens and CCD.
However, you say:
A razor sharp 1600x1200 picture can be printed at nearly any size and look great. Unless you have nerves of steel to hold the camera steady, you're not going to be able to take a picture sharp enough to take advantage of 11 megapixels.
Stability isn't the issue. Exposure is. If you use a faster shutter speed blur will be less of an issue. The resolution you set the camera to will have nothing to do with it.
Additionally, if you plan to print at higher than 72dpi (yetch) you will need a higher resolution image to get the same width & height dimensions on the printed page. Which means more pixels!
I'd be interested to know what kind of camera that you are using that needs such a slow exposure to generate a decent picture. It sounds to me you have a camera that is doing less than midrange digitals currently can. Nevermind highend ones.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
That's right. It's also useful to have "extra" resolution for cropping purposes. Like if your original photo isn't framed just right and has distracting/ugly junk off to one side, or if you want to work with just a part of a larger photo. (Many of the famous photographic prints we've all seen are cropped from the original negatives for reasons like these.)
Anyway, the more image resolution you have overall, the more pixels you have to work with in that cropped portion, and the better your final results will be. That can give a photographer a lot more "darkroom" flexibility with their digital image.
no, it's not. at this stage in digital photography, there are already a lot of pro-level cameras that can match 35mm film quality (D1X, ID, D60, even the D30). "a few years back", pro level cameras might have been a 2MP SLR which of course pales in comparison to film. current hardware and software CAN match 35 mm film quality.
Even if you've got a bottom-of-the-barrel $49 printer, it will do at least 600x600DPI. A 5"x7" print will use 3000x4200 pixels at that resolution, or over 12 megapixels. Dye sublimation will hide the loss of clarity because the process is inherently blurry at the pixel level, there is no set of sharp dots. But if you are looking for great contrasty detail, like nature photography where you want to see veining on a dragonfly wing, you are going to want those pixels. A 2.1 megapixel camera will give you far less than 300x300 DPI on a 5"x7".
Even a (relatively) cheap 35mm SLR like the Canon Eos Rebel at under $250 will easily take negatives with ordinary film that will print a 8"x10" that you will need a magnifying glass to see all the detail.
Modern inkjet technology is not just ON or OFF. They do volume control to regulate the density of color. Current technology is amazing, they regulate volume into the low picoliter range. Here is a cheap $99 HP printer, capable of doing 2400x1200 resolution on photo paper. Here is an explaination of HP PhotoREt technology, although other printer makers can do similar kinds of things. Even assuming you need eight "dots" to get a true 24 bit color, that is giving you a real 600x600 DPI resolution.
The best part about this it's a full frame CMOS sensor, meaning it has the same 24mm x 36mm frame size as a 35mm film frame would. Almost all other CMOS sensors (outside of the Contax N1, who$e co$t i$ not an ea$y $um to $ave for) are smaller than the standard 35mm frame. This changes the effective focal length of the lens, making it a longer lens. A 15mm superwide lens on a normal 35mm frame becomes a 22mm effective focal length on say a Canon D60. (As a side effect, because of this, all of the superwide SLR lenses are backordered, mine has been on order almost 2 months, grumble grumble.) Now you can buy a lens for your film camera and have it be exactly the same effective focal length for your digital cam. I have a Canon film SLR, good camera. I like the fact that now there is a decent upgrade path, though it pretty much is a given that this would have happened eventually.
After shooting commercially for a year with a Phase One back on a Hassie after 10+ years of using Fujichrome and Ektachrome, I can tell you that's flat out wrong. The dynamic range of a digital back is about twice that of slide film.
And using that back changed the studio from top to bottom. Much more effecient and profitable. We shot double-trucks (with a little Fractal tools wizardry) that were beautiful. Digital is the way to for the pro now.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Erm, it has.
For many photographers the argument has moved on. A 3MP camera called the D30 was one crushing argument, the D30 upped the ante further and the 1D killed film for sports/pj use. (Nikon made some equivalent cameras).
As for your comment about contrast, the response of a 1D or D30 totally wipes the floor with transparencies/negatives.
The argument has now moved to medium format and the new 1DS camera looks like it may make a convincing point for the digital camp.
Please mod up one of the rebuttals to this guy's comments.
Rob. (Happy owner of an EOS 1D, D30 and EOS 3 film camera)