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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."
I would like to see comparison images taken with a low level megapixel device compared with this one.
11 megapixels is an impressive number - but means nothing to me until i see what that actually translates to - picure. 1K words. etc....
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.
Cannon sure will get pissed at Slashdot now, wont they!
When will a consumer version be anywhere near that, and why do we really need to have 11mpixels for most shots, after 2mpix it was really hard to tell the difference anyway.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
At least by pretending they announced this by mistake, they just generated more buzz about it. :)
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
In case of slashdotting or other badness:
Canon Europe celebrates Digital Revolution at Photokina 2002
24/9/2002
Witness the launch of Canon Imaging Gateway an online digital imaging service for consumers
Canon takes its large format printers to high street print shops to deliver fast, large-scale image reproduction
Canon celebrates 15 years of EOS with the launch of the EOS 1Ds - the world's highest resolution professional camera
Cologne, Germany - Canon Europe will use Photokina 2002 as the launch-pad for its latest innovative digital technologies designed to meet the demands of both the consumer imaging and professional print markets.
Forecasting a stunning 70% increase in production of digital still cameras, 2002 has already been an historic year for Canon Europe as both professionals and consumers fully embrace digital imaging.
Mr Hajime Tsuruoka, Canon Europe's Chief Executive Officer and President, said: "Canon Europe is at the forefront of the digital revolution and we plan to remain there. Our strengths as an organisation lie in our implicit understanding of the digital process from start to finish. In addition, we are one of the only electronics companies that own and continue to develop innovative technologies for both the consumer and professional print markets and many of these products will be unveiled at this year's Photokina show, one of the most important industry events in the Canon Europe calendar."
Canon Consumer Imaging
Photokina marks the 15-year anniversary of EOS as a brand. Canon is announcing two new EOS models at the show - the world's highest resolution Pro-camera, the EOS 1Ds and the EOS 300V, which is predicted to become the world's number 1 selling SLR camera.
The EOS-1Ds features the first ever full frame 35mm CMOS sensor with 11.1 million effective pixels. The EOS-1Ds capture astounding detail & colour, almost doubling the resolution ordinarily considered state of the art for a digital SLR camera in the world today.*
Also new this year are three digital still cameras, all featuring the new high performance DIGital Imaging Core (DIGIC) processor. One of the trio, the Digital IXUS v, is claiming the position as the world's smallest 3.2 Megapixel digital camera with optical zoom and LCD monitor.*
Along with the new additions to the camera line up, Canon is announcing Canon Imaging Gateway (CIG), a digital imaging web site, which Canon Europe sees as the vital missing link in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by creating a one-on-one communication channel to consumer users.
The online solution will allow users to download updates for their digital cameras, in much the same way that mobile phone users download personalised ring-tones. CIG also offers other services online, such as photo albums, photo-printing.
Canon Business Solutions
Canon, recently named one of the world's 'Innovation Elite' by Reuters Business Insight, will also announce the decision by its Business Solutions division to target high-street mini labs with its new range of industry-leading, large format printing devices.
On stand at the show, Canon will be demonstrating how large format devices, such as the W2200 and W7250, will offer the photographic and photo finishing markets innovative solutions to reproduce digital images in poster size, with speed and ease.
Accessible, easy to use, large format Canon printers will be installed in high street photo labs, a move that the market leaders see as a natural progression in the digital revolution. Consumers will be able to turn images from a digital camera, CD, floppy disk, print or negative into large scale versions of their images within an hour, at a considerably lower price than traditional photographic enlargements solutions currently on the market.
* As of September 2002
About Canon Europe
Canon Europe is a subsidiary of Canon Inc. of Japan, a world-leading innovator and provider of imaging and information technology solutions for individuals and businesses.
Canon Europe is a subsidiary of Canon Inc. of Japan, a world-leading innovator and provider of imaging and information technology solutions for individuals and businesses.
The main business focus for Canon Europe is in two clearly defined markets: Business Solutions (network peripherals: photocopy, printer, scanner and fax solutions) and Consumer Imaging (Input Solutions: photographic equipment including analogue and digital cameras and camcorders; and Output Solutions: Bubble Jet and other printers).
Canon Europe also provides Industrial Products including broadcast lenses, semiconductor and medical equipment.
Canon Europe employs more than 12,000 people across 19 countries.
though this camera will undoubtedly be used by pros. Most people don't realize how big a file an 11mp camera would produce at the highest quality setting, not to mention raw mode! I have a D30 (3.25mp) and the best quality jpg's are around 1mb. The D60 doubles that. Once you get a large number of images, size matters. I have 10+GB of D30 images. It means you have to have a good backup solution (read: not CD-ROM).
Pretty impressive, but you still can't get the constrasts and subtle shadows and depth that you can get with film. I still happily use a 2mpixel camera. I don't usually print my photos and my monitor can't go past 1200x1600 anyway.
Perhaps what's most impressive about this leaked announcement is that Canon is not playing the release only in small increments game that companies usually do. Why release a product 4 times better than your competitors when you can keep releasing disabled products for the next 4 years that will still beat your competitors by 10% every year. Do you think Intel would just go ahead and release a 40 Ghz processor next week if they could figure out how to do it? The question is are they going to have 11mpixel cameras in their consumer and prosumer lines or just in their professional cameras?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I wonder how many engineers died choking on someone elses vomit?
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
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 $6k lying around and don't want to do things like buy cars or computers or tons of other cool stuff with it, I'll consider getting one of these.
This isn't really for the average layman, at least that is obvious. Is it only news on slashdot because some web author screwed up while he was proofing the draft? Mabye not. 11 megapixels is a huge jump (twice the current high-end professional ones).
The biggest question, however, is how many megapixels are needed before the quality is on par with analog cameras.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
Taking even a very high-resolution (for a desktop) monitor, say 1600x1200, is less than 2 Megapixels. So anything higher than that will have to be downsampled to display on a monitor anyway (either that or you'll have to scroll around). The main advantage in going higher than that is for high-quality printing. Printing a standard 3x5" photograph at 300 dpi requires a bit less than a 5 Megapixel camera, though something less will probably do okay too. Of course the more megapixels, the bigger you can print and still have it look good.
Also, if you want to do image editing, you'll want to start out with a higher-quality image than what you want as a final image, since filtering/etc. will invariably reduce the quality of the image.
So is 11 megapixel necessary? If you're taking pictures to email to grandma, certainly not. If you want to print out 8x10" photographs on high-quality photographic paper, it could be nice.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The real news here is that the sensor is full-frame 35mm. That means that they can make a digital back for a standard 35mm camera (or a digital camera in a 35mm body, like most small pro cameras), and you will get full frame shots (ie, what you see in the viewfinder is the same as what will be on disk).
The other good news is that they didn't reduce the pixel size to increase the resolution. This gives better image fidelity (contrast and color saturation). That's the funny part about digital camera resolution - they keep increasing the number of pixels in roughly the same sensor area - they get fewer photons per pixel, but more pixels per frame.
This should be cool (I'll check it out at Photokina)
- The Sigless Wonder
People go on and on about how high the resolution on a camera is, but I rarely take a picture with my 2 megapixel camera that's sharp enough to take advantage of all 2000 of those pixels. If I jitter the camera just slightly, I cut the effective resolution in half. Most of the time I could've taken the picture at a lower resolution and scaled the picture up in the GIMP and gotten the same damn picture.
What I really want is a more sensitive CCD that can take sharper pictures with less light and more brilliant color. 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. Unless it's high noon in Arizona and the blinding sun is at your back, your CCD just won't be fast enough.
Erik
CMOS sensors look much worse than CCDs, so even a 11.1MP CMOS sensor will likely look worse than a 3-4MP CCD.
Um... The Canon D30 3 megapixel digital SLR has a CMOS censor. And although it might be a bit outdated on the megapixel front it still delivers one of the best quality images from a digital camera.
Yup. Where have you been?
Lets hope they didn't pull a Palm and its really 10.9993949929 Megapixels. Whew, dodge a bullet there.
But in all seriousiness. I sure hope it's really 11 Megapixels and not "11 Megapixels if you count these as individual pixels even though the industry standard doesn't, rar rar rar rar rar.."
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
I agree. Digital is just at the edge of 35mm quality. But medium and large format quality is ways off. The practical advantages are probably causing many to move to digital anyway.
Here's 35mm vs medium format if you're interested: comparing formats
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).
begin 644
Yeah, I'm using a little 2.1MP camera with a 128M SmartCard in it. Knowing that at the highest resolution, I'm can only fit a few dozen shots, makes me wonder what hoops I'll need to jump through with one of those 11MP monsters.
On an interesting side note, though, if you're just doing static scenery stuff, or studio work, you can use something like ComCam, a tool written to interact with Olympus digitals (like my c2100uz), that gives you full settings control, as well as downloads the image after it's shot.
If the 11MP cameras are in an SLR body, they can be T-mounted to telescopes, which will really open the door for good resolution amateur astronomy.
There's more than one kind of photography geek. Sadly, I'm like, three.
- billn
I'm a retard.
s/ComCam/Cam2Com/g;
- billn
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.
Yes, it's 11 megapixel, which is great for very large prints. This also means that photographers using the camera will have that much more space to crop and still come out with a printable photo.
The other advancement that is very important is that it is a full-frame CMOS sensor. 35mm film is 24mm by 35mm. Today's digital cameras use sensors that are smaller than this. The side-effect of this is that you end up with what some call a focal-length multiplier. The Canon D60 digital SLR has a 1.6x focal-length multiplier, meaning that a 100mm lens turns into a 160mm lens. It doesn't really multiply the focal length, it just crops the image to only record the center portion of the lens' field of view.
This is great if you want to really zoom in on something, but if you're looking for wide angle, you have to buy expensive super-wide angle lenses to get the same effect. Now with a full-frame sensor, you actually get the focal length of the lens you buy.
This is speculation, but I imagine the 's' in 1Ds stands for studio. The Canon EOS 1D is a great pro digital SLR - it has super-fast AF, is built like a tank, has seperate color spaces, and can shoot up to 8 frames per second! However, it's 4 megapixel. The 1Ds is 11.1 megapixel, and will probably only be able to shoot about 2 to 3 frames per second. Perfect for the studio - not that great for sports photography.
I'm very interested to see/hear about the other improvements Canon may have made in the 1Ds!
- Eric, a Canon EOS D60 owner
And the D60 has a 6mp cmos sensor, the most beautifull image in this price-range
I'd rather be sailing...
This 1 GB Microdrive I've used suddenly becomes obsolete if you're a fan of compressed RAW images (as my Canon S40 and I are).
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'
1) Aim camera.
2) Press button to activate shutter.
3) Push 500 MB file through USB connection to attached network storage drive.
4) Watch hard drive light for 30 seconds.
5) Wait.
6) Send to grandma's AOL dial-up via your own AOL dial-up.
7) Tell everyone to hold still again.
8) Repeat.
"Taking even a very high-resolution (for a desktop) monitor, say 1600x1200, is less than 2 Megapixels."
And don't assume that this will always be the case in the future. I predict that someday 1600x1200 screens will seem as quaint as 640x480 screens are now.
mahlen
History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.
--Clarence Darrow
High pixel digital cameras allow for better security cameras. being able to resolve the liscense plate numbers off a car outside a store. ie. Things further away are resolvable to a useful level. There are a lot of implications to this, i think.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I have a canon s40 which is a pretty decent digital camera.
my only really big complaint about it is depth of field. except in extreme scenarios, EVERYTHING is going to be in focus with that camera. depth of field is one of the most important tools of photography to emphasize what you want to emphasize in the picture.
because the CCD is so much smaller than 35mm film, the lens is shorter. to accomodate the shorter lens and smaller sensor, the aperature is smaller than 35mm equivilent.
the 3 big ingredients to controlling depth of field are aperature, lens length and distance.
with todays smaller than 35mm digital cameras, the aperature is significantly smaller than 35mm equivilent (greater DOF)
the lens length is significantly shorter than 35mm equivilent (greater DOF)
so all you have is distance...
if you focus on something 2 feet away, maybe something across the street will be somewhat out of focus.
with a 35mm camera (digital or film), you can focus on something 2 feet away and then you, the photographer, can choose whether you want the thing across the street to be almost perfectly in focus or so out of focus that you can't even distinguish whether it's a tree or if it's a building.
this kicks a lot of ass.
my livejournal is interesting and worth reading - I swear. I know everyone thinks their blog is interesting. mine is.
Just a quick comment on megapixelling. Many in the camera world would have you believe that pixels == effective resolution of pictures. This is not true. The resolution of the CCD is analagous to the resolution of the film in a normal camera. As resolutions get higher, film is generally not the limiting factor to the sharpness of an image (or the color saturation, for that matter).
We tested a nice consumer level 6 MP (IIRC) camera informally with an odd shaped object. We found that we could not discern the shape of the object from a distance under any conditions, even though the camera clearly had enough pixel resolution to do so. (Yes we checked lossy compression was off) Therefore, the effective resolution was less than the resolution of the CCD. So maybe (not tested with our tests) a lower resolution camera will give similar results with a blow up in photoshop? I don't know, there are many variables.
In an SLR camera, light has to pass through as many as 15 glass elements before the light hits the film, these elements usually form the basis for the limiting resolution, not the film. So maybe you 6 MP fanboys don't need penis envy over the 11 MP camera afterall.... What we need to see is a affordable digital SLR that can take AIS (for nikon) or equivalent lenses so we aren't stuck with stock glass.
-Sean
I have a friend who's the head of a professional photographers guild in Hawaii. She explained why (a few years back) she thought digital photography would be a long time overtaking conventional photography. Film delivers the equivalent of about 14 megapixels. More importantly, film has far greater dynamic range than most digital processes. This means (as a previous poster mentioned) that you can shift color and contrast quite a bit without losing information.
High quality magazines print at 187 lines per inch (not DPI as another poster states, there IS a difference). In order to provide decent color information, a source file should have a DPI of twice the line screen, or nearly 400 DPI at 24 bit color for a high quality print. Say the magazine is 8.5x11 and you are printing a full page ad. You need 3400x4400 pixels for best quality.
So a professional 35mm that gives you the full 14 megapixels is good enough. This new 11 megapixel camera still isn't. This is not even counting larger format printing, like posters, which though usually printed at a lower line screen than 187, are much bigger than 8.5x11. This is why medium and large format professional cameras use larger film for even more resolution.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I have a Contax 645, and the digital backs available for that camera [ Kodak and Phase one ] are 16 megapixel. That is more than adequate to rival film resolution, but no digital solution will rival the contrast range of film and the low light performance and shadow detail of film.
Flamers can note I realize the camera in question is SLR with interchangeable lenses. But it is not affordable at 6,000.... Nor is it clear that the lenses in optimal conditions (high shutter speed, f-stop sweet spot) have a 11 MP effective resolution.
-Sean
As I said in This post 12MP is about what you need to match 35mm film. This is close enough that it probably doesn't matter. You can make some big ass posters with these images without seeing any graininess. My friend has a 5MP camera and you can already make A size plots that are indistinguishable from photos.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
uh, thats just the little blurb, not the article, we can't slashdot /. itself. But what if we coud...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Particularly with a large print, you're going to give your full attention to only a portion of the print at any one time. So, even if the eye can only see 800x600 or whatever (though calculations like this are pretty misleading because the eye does all sorts of image processing tricks and has non-uniform sensor density, IIRC), that doesn't mean a higher-resolution image is a waste.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"I can't imagine anyone needing a digital camera with more than 640K pixels" -- Bill Gates 1973.
A great deal of stuff is coded in number of pixels, so the higher resolution you go to, the smaller it gets on screen (unless you simultaneously move to a bigger monitor). Thus even if you solved the dot pitch problems and could run a 15" monitor at 3200x2400 crisply, you wouldn't be able to make out anything on screen.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you buy really good, really slow speed film that has minimal grain, the film can hold a little less than 20 megapixels of data. But to get a good quality shot that will have enough detail to fill all that information, you need to have a very steady tripod, a very good quality lens and perfect focusing and exposure.
I have a new film scanner I use that has made scans up around 5500x3600 pixels. That's about the highest one needs to go to get all the information out of an image. Oh and that comes out to about 19.8 mega pixels, which is about a 60 meg uncompressed file (24bit RGB). You can also scan in using 16bit RGB channels resulting in an image around 120megs.
And think, that's just 35mm film, which is about 1 square inch. Imagine what a large format camera can shoot with it's 8x10" film. And the film can be even larger than that!
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
You may be right. There's a camera which a Foveon sensor, but it's still at "price and availability to be announced". I saw what was claimed to be a prototype early this year, but it doesn't seem to be in production.
Noone _said_ we really need to have 11 megapixels for most shots. Even Canon doesn't think that, hence the > $5500 US price for this camera (body only, mind).
Your post is like seeing an announcement for a server 1TB RAID array, asking when a desktop version will arrive, and why would most people need a 1TB RAID array on the desktop.
Feh.
This is seriously high-end equipment, and is intended by it's maker as such, and it's priced accordingly.
Also note, according to the premature press release, it's a 'full-frame' sensor, which will make it the first of its kind on the market. Couple that with Canon's excellent line of lenses, and this is a fantastic announcement.
Anybody else notice that the newest story has been there for like 30 minutes with still no first post?
What's going on?
Yeah ... but what if they were to bundle it with one of these?
Here is a very good article comparing
Film vs. Digital
Bottom line: This camera can beat some 35mm films in resolution, but not all of them.
Digital still has a long way to go:
8x10 format film is equivalent to ~1000 Mpixel
Or people who want longer-range shots without carrying heavy, expensive telephoto lenses, and don't mind cropping.
For instance, take your average "prosumer" non-SLR digital camera. They've got, what, 3-4MP, and usually not much better than a 175mm (35mm equiv) optical zoom -- often 105-140mm (35 mm equiv) when down in the sub-$600 range or so, with the 2100UZ and 720UZ from Olympus being the major exceptions. 140mm is rarely sufficient if, say, you'd like to photograph small, wild birds, or squirrels in trees, or other even not-terribly-far-but-small subjects.
11 MP / 4 MP = 2.75. Take the square root -- that's 1.658. That is, if you're perfectly happy with a 4 MP image right now, you could get 4 MP from an 11 MP monster CCD and essentially multiply the zoom by 1.658, without needing a teleconverter or a higher-end lens.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
a 35mm frame is 36x24mm (strange, but true) That's roughly 7200x4800 pixels, or 34.56 MPixels
And 35mm is small-format. Photographers going for higher quality go with "medium format" (70mm film, 60x60mm image size - think Hasselblad) or larger, roughly 12000x12000 pixels -- 144 megapixels. Digital still has a ways to go to catch up at the high end.
-- Alastair
Title of Article: "Canon Mistakenly Announces 11-Megapixel Digital Camera"
Sample content of parent post: "11 megapixel camera"
Moderation of parent post: "Offtopic=1"
Personality rating of Moderator: "Clue=0"
what are you going to do? Take a picture of your monitor?
What your raving about would require real live naked people, which is not something most slashdotters get the chance to see.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Currently I have an epson Perfection 2450 and a FSCKING BIG CAMERA which produces 4x5" negatives.
:)
:)
With the right film, exposure and developing I can scan those negatives/slides at 2400dpi and they look tack sharp.
Now it 48-bit colour that gives a 690Mb image file
Digital just cant match that - so i'm going to stick with analog for serious photos. Maybe go digital for snapshops
Interesting, I've found the exact opposite to be true. I'm going to first assume you're talking about slide film, which has a dynamic range of about four stops, since that's what most people are shooting professionally (save for photojournalists and wedding photographers).
I've found that the shadow detail in digital cameras (specifically the canon d60) can be absolutely stunning- through some Levels adjustment I've been able to take parts of a digital image that appear completely black, and get excellent detail out of them, something I'd never be able to do shooting on transparencies.
I'd recommend a look at Michael Reichmann's site, where he reviews the D60 vs. 35mm vs. Medium Format and concludes that for up to 11x17 prints, the Canon D60 is at least as good as 35mm. Furthermore, I've personally found that the raw images delivered by my D60 look better on screen and in print than scanned in images, since the pixel quality simply seems better (despite using a top of the line film scanner that's optimally configured).
In closing, as a professional photographer, I've never had a client need anything more resolution than what I've been able to deliver digitally.
No wonder they want it down.
"11" megapixels
Pretty much all the high-end cameras use firewire.
Man, if I had this pent up I'd be releasing prematurely too!
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Crying 'Not Overkill' shows ignorance of the practical world of photography. Theoritical maximums and ideal values are meaningless when the end viewer can't tell the difference. There is no way an average human being can differentiate between a 200 DPI print from a 4 to 6 MP camera and a 400 DPI print from a 11 MP camera. Not even with a magnifying glass.
Many highly regarded professional photographers are shooting very successfully with a Nikon D1H with it's measly 2.7 megapixels. A high quality image has such more more to do with the person behind the camera, not the camera itself. An 11 megapixel, 400 DPI crap image is still a crap image.
If you can't create a very high quality printed image using the gear we have RIGHT NOW you can't blame the camera or printer. It's a blow to the ego at first, but liberating later on.
So deep, you can almost see her eggs...
- passion
We're not there yet, but it's about time.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
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."
The 300V is the replacement for the Rebel 2000/EOS 300 camera, which is a film camera. I think it's the #1 selling SLR in the world, so it's a big deal for Canon. I got my gf the Rebel 2000, pretty cool.
Whats the range of B/W print film? I know it's got a much stronger dynamic range than color print or slide film.
I don't know what the pixel bit depth is, but as far as file size.. My D60 pumps out between 9 and 12 meg RAW files, and it's 6 megapixel. I imagine the 1Ds would do around 15 to 18 meg file sizes, maybe larger.
.CRW files are the actual bit for bit data from the CMOS sensor. It's more pixel sensor size, color accuracy, sharpness of the optics, and most importantly, photographer skill. Can't ever forget that. Even a $50,000 camera will not make a poor photographer into a great photographer. :-)
I don't think actual file size has anything to do with it, though, except for real estate. The RAW
Normal CCD pixels are only sensitive to one light component (usually R, G and B). So when you have, say, 3 megapixels, you only have 1 million red samples, 1 million green samples and 1 million blue samples (actually this isn't exactly right, because green is usually given priority, so on most 3 megapixel cameras you have 1.5 million green samples, 750k red samples and 750k blue samples).
Basically what this means is that if you want a clean-looking image, with no coloured halos in high-contrast areas, you should have at least 3 times as many CCD pixels as you want to have in the final image.
Also, because CCDs can be quite "noisy" under low light, it helps to have more samples so that when you average them you get a more stable colour.
As a rule of thumb, with mid-range CCDs, you'll be able to get pretty good pictures at 1/4 of the camera's resolution (ie, if the camera shoots at 2048x1536, the picture will look better - without red/blue outlines and with a lot less noise - if you resample it to 1024x768).
Some cameras will do this automatically when you select a lower resolution (ie, shoot at maximum, then resample), others will capture the image directly at the lowest resolution, using only half the CCD's pixels. If you're not sure how your camera works, you should always shoot at the maximum resolution and then downsample in an image editing program if you want to get rid of halos / noise.
RMN
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In a 2 MegaPixel camera, there are 4 types of color receptors. So, at maximum resolution, each pixel in your photo is made up of of light that was received by at least 4 receptors. That's why your photos look 'blurred' when you zoom in on them..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I thought Shannon's law of sampling applied to the frequency resolution of repeated discrete-time sampling (i.e. sampling audio data 44100 times/second, as on a CD). What does that have to do with a single sample?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I can see how it would be applicable here. Basically you're doing repeated samples at discrete distances from each other, so it's analogous to the audio sampling, only not in the time domain.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You are assuming the pixels are square or otherwise equal dimensions horozontally and vertically. They may not be. For example, the Nikon D1X has rectangular sensor pits... twice the resolution horozontally than vertically. (The D1 and D1H had square sensors, and the D1X doubled the number horozontally in the same space, but has the same number vertically) D1X images are 3008x1960, but the sensor is 4,024 x 1,324.
Yes, I am indeed assuming that the pixels are square, but then again, so are you! Note that in my original post, I was talking about the pixel dimensions of an image from the camera -- not the raw pixel dimensions of the CCD, which are irrelevant to this discussion. I guessed the pixel dimensions to be 4096x2688. Assuming a target aspect ratio of exactly 1.5:1 (35mm standard), this produces pixels that are square within a 2% tolerance. (Or, looking at it the other way around, if you assume that the pixels are perfectly square, this results in a very slightly wide image, with an aspect ratio of ~1.52:1.)
In your Nikon D1X "counterexample", you quoted image pixel dimensions of 3008x1960. Well guess what: assuming the same 1.5:1 target aspect ratio, your example is also just over 2% of being perfectly square! (Or, if assumed to be perfectly square, it produces an aspect ratio of ~1.53:1.)
I should add that tolerances of 2% are really not significant, because even 35mm film almost always produces images that are a little wider than the nominal 1.5:1 ratio.
All of the digital cameras I've ever seen produce square pixels, whether the target aspect ratio is 1.5:1 or a more computer-friendly 4:3. Can you point to a real counterexample?
begin 644
Gah, Slashdot moderation doesn't work. Somebody should have modded down my post as over rated, as a bunch of professional chimed in to prove me wrong.
Obviously, I haven't kept up in the world of photography since then. I wonder if medium and large format cameras still in use professionally, and if so, where?
My guess is that there are still some applications for that etch, but it sounds like, more and more, digital is sufficient for most professional applications.
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