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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."
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!
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!
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'
with this camera it may be :
"A picture is worth 2 Libraries of Congress"
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
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
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'
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 can't imagine anyone needing a digital camera with more than 640K pixels" -- Bill Gates 1973.
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
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