Slashdot Mirror
13.8MP Kodak Tops Previously Leaked Canon
MadCow42 writes "With the professional imaging trade show Photokina opening this week in Koln Germany, digital camera manufacturers are announcing a stunning new lineup of professional digital cameras. These include a 13.8 megapixel monster from Kodak, and a 11.1 megapixel camera from Canon. I'm sure Nikon isn't too far behind, but no news yet on their offerings. These cameras are positioned for the professional photographer, but with list prices from under $4k to $6k, they're not out of reach for the 'pro-sumer' market either. The best news is that new products like this will push prices down on the 4-6MP cameras at the high end of the consumer level." We mentioned the premature release giving Canon's hand away; like MadCow42, I want to see what Nikon has to say.
"Oh shit!"
OK, I'm sure they'll come out with something.
We're closing on 35mm with about 8 MP....with about 20 MP we'll be in the 645 category. What's next?
So, at what megapixel mark reach comparable to "photo quality". Not to say the actual quality of photos, but high enough for 720-dpi or so - so you could print it as a decent photo?
Or are we already there, and I just don't pay attention?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Someone, somewhere, should be working on inexpensive reusable "films" that have the same resolution as traditional film. It just doesn't make sense to be buying new cameras everytime CCDs get cheaper. At the very least, someone needs to make the chips interchangeable, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon since the camera companies like things the way they are. So, what kind of brew of light sensitive chemicals, magnetism, and degaussing apparatus will give us cheap "digital film"? Only time will tell.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I was an "early adopter" of a Kodak DC-210 1-MPx digital camera. I've taken thousands of pictures with it - most archived on CD-R.
I love it!
Between my 5 children, running my own business, and home-schooling them, I just never got the time to run stupid errands like developing film.
My my DC-210, I just plug the Compact Flash card into my USB reader, save to the HDD, and every few months to CD-R.
Given that my 1.0 MPx camera blows up to about 6x8 before looking "grainy", I can't see the need for more than about 4 Mpx, but then again, "we don't need more than 640k!"...
With my DC-210, I get pictures I simply wouldn't have any other way... pictures I will cherish as an old fart.
Anyway, I recommend one. Highly.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Well, Epson says that a high quality color inkjet prints at 1440x720 dpi (they have some at double that...)
Let's say you ignore that and print at 300 dpi. That's 2400 by 3000 pixels. There's 7.2 MP.
What I mean to say is, we read about facial recognition software and the way that the government abuses it every day here on Slashdot and on other privacy sites. With the ever-higher resolutions on these cameras, it will only make it that much easier for a computer to pick out someone's face in a crowd, tieing them into a huge database of personal data that the government keeps a secret and taking away their Constitutional right to privacy. The potential consequences are astounding.
I think perhaps we should think more carefully about the implications of such an advance in technology before we go ahead with blindly cheering it on. Dire predictions just might turn out to be true.
--sdem
Now, if only the price came down...
taking a picture of a Beowulf cluster with one of these!
So, is this a good time to ask whether floppy disk drives are worth having?
These cameras are positioned for the professional photographer, but with list prices from under $4k to $6k, they're not out of reach for the 'pro-sumer' market either.
Since when was $4k-6k "pro-sumer" range? I'm no photography/digital camera buff by any stretch of the imagination so maybe this is just my naivete but I can't see spending that much money on one of these cameras unless you are professional when a 4-6 megapixel camera delivers damn good quality pictures and will be significantly less expensive.
But what the FSCK are we gonna do with a 100 million pixel camera (around 2010ish???) WTF? Any serious uses, I'd love to hear imaginations run wild. And no, I'm not talking pr0n, I mean medical, etc. I just don't see a use for it. Do you?
The Canon D1s uses a CMOS sensor (not CCD), which results in very low noise. This sensor type has a far lower noise floor then film or CCD. Although CCDs from Kodak and Nikon out-pixel-count the D30/D60/D1s, I would take a 'lowly' D60 any day of the week, simply because it has a pure color ramp with no noise, and all the resolution you would ever need, unless your printing multi-foot-wide prints.
As an aside, the new D1s is also full frame, meaning you do not have to multiply your lenses by a certain factor in order to get correct results.
"The best news is that new products like this will push prices down on the 4-6MP cameras at the high end of the consumer level."
IMHO, they won't have a real impact on that market. Canon's excellent G2, a 4-megapixel camera, is currently selling at a street price of $600-$650. Others are in that same range, between $500 and $1000. Do you really think that someone considering the purchase of a $700 camera is going to be swayed by a $4000 camera with less than twice the resolution (noting that resolution varies with the square of the pixel count)? And remember, interchangeable lenses means they're extra, so the actual price difference is actually greater.
I'm really excited about these new cameras and sensors, and I think they're going to make a big impact in the film-dominated pro market, but to think they're going to generate price pressure on sub-$1000 cameras would be like Toyota dropping Camry prices to compete with the newest Lamborghini.
im sure a real photographer would be much happier with a headline like, Cannon develops new camera which improves color accuracy, or a camera which can take more than 8 pictures per second. these cameras will have worse image quality than 3-4 megapixel cameras on regular sized prints. (in brief the higher the resolution given a constant image area in the camera the smaller the recievers, the less light the reciever gets. noise is constant for a single reciever so the less light the less signal. ie less accurate pixels) about the only thing this is usefull for would be that it allows for very large prints, then again who's ever heard of a professional photographer printing a digital image in large format? the technology's just not there yet. for the time being ill stick to good ole silver nitrates and developer.
--aiee
A few things about inkjets. First off, inkjets need to use higher DPI because the ink is essentially being spit out at the paper. they don't really know where the ink is going to land on the paper. They know more or less, and the slower the print out the more precisely they do know. Even so, in order to maake the colors correct they aren't actually putting the inks on top of each other, but simply so close that they seem to be in the same spot, but realistically i think they 1/3 or 1/4 the number to determine how many dots are being printed per pixel, in order to make all the colors needed. So a 1200x1200 DPI printer would be able to yeild only 7.2 MP, if they blend four dots per pixel to make accurate color blending.
I could be wrong on this, but I Know that 300dpi is Way too low to make an 8x10 print, the inkjet might spit it out fast, but it ends up looking horrible.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
dpreview.com is running quite a bit of news about Photokina 2002. They've even got 2 images of the new Kodak. (Note: that's /of/ not /from/).
s 14n.asp
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0209/02092304kodakdc
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Here is a very detailed article comparing Film vs. Digital
This might be better than some 35mm films, especially at the higher ISO ratings.
Of course, it may be easier to get larger film than a larger sensor...
Nikon is the choice of pros for reasons other than pixel count. Nikon understands the concept of an investment. They realize that a professional photographer does not want to replace thousands of dollars worth of lenses just to get a new camera body. That's why you can take 20 and 30 year old Nikon lenses and put them on a brand-new Nikon digital SLR. Sure, it won't magically turn them into autofocus, but they will still work fine.
Nikon also builds a level of quality into their cameras that's just missing from many other brands. While Canon and Minolta make some great cameras, the pro Nikons are almost beyond reproach. Many of them have been used by photojournalists in such grueling conditions that it's a wonder that they work at all, but they just keep going until the lettering is all worn off of the countrols and the bodies look like they've been dragged behind trucks.
Consumer camera manufacturers don't get it, changing lenses on an all-too-frequent basis. They often come up with an all-new design that is totally incompatible with older lens series. While Canon has had some success in the semi-pro and pro market, Nikon is still king of the hill there.
Just had to do the quick math to figure out the approximate "top end" that one of these cameras can shoot. My admitedly aging Epson PhotoPC 750z is a 1.9MP camera, and tops out at 1600x1200 in an interpolated mode. Normal mode is only 1280x960 which is still fantastic for what I use it for, namely web page creation. I think it is still easier to crop and scale down than to scale up.
Anyway, going with the assumption of a 4x3 aspect ratio in the new camera, 13.8MP would yield a resolution of roughly 4300x3225 (13,867,500 pixels). Doing simple division to fit that roughly into an 8x10 photo would give you about 410dpi. A far cry better than the 150dpi that my camera is capable of. And while it is still not in the ballpark of 720dpi (7488x5616 or 41.8MP), it's surely a lot better than this amature photographer is ever going to need.
When the 20MP cameras are available, we will be looking at 5168x3876 (20,031,168 pixels) which yields 495dpi for an 8x10 photo.
Check out some pictures of the new Kodak at dpreview. It looks pretty nice. I like big cameras that fill my hands, have a nice solid feel, and weigh a few pounds.
Of course my dream camera is 4-6 megapixel SLR that has a full-35mm-size *interchangeable* sensor (in case I want to upgrade to more pixels), low noise, good color, and takes EOS lenses. All for $500 or less. Just a few more years....
A bunch of people are asking what resolution produces a good 8x10 print. I shoot at 3mp for the most part, and get stunning 8x10 prints from my $100 off the shelf printer using good photopaper. Unless you're a pro, $4000 is a waste of money for a digital still camera. If you are a pro, you'll buy a nikon d1x or a good camera; Not anything with kodaks name on it.
Maskirovka
Printer DPI and photographic image DPI are entirely different.
A 720DPI printer, for example, will be able to spit about half a million ink droplets per square inch of paper, but one ink droplet != 1 pixel. Remember, as the previous reply stated, the printer uses many small droplets of exactly four colors (some inkjets use up to eight colors) of ink and attempts to create the perception of a certain color by mixing dots of those, much like your monitor uses different and separate intensities of red, green, and blue to approximate a color other than one of those three.
So how does the DPI rating of an ink printer relate to the DPI of a digital camera? It doesn't necessarily. In fact, most parts of any color printout will not have the maximum number of ink droplets (even if using absorbent photo paper) because far fewer are needed, particularly with light colors. There is absolutely no way to compare the two, but in general a 300DPI image will look better than most modern ink printers can accurately portray, and 600DPI will approach the representational limits of color laser, dye sublimation, and good thermal wax printers.
The DPI-to-paper ratio is a simple matter of comparing the resolutions (say, 1600x1200) of the digital camera image with the size of the printout (say, 8x10")
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Read the article, nimrod. The Kodak is basically a second-tier version of the 1Ds for the Nikon mount.
And it is also full-frame.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
You're referring to the xD-Picture Card, which was announced back in July. 128MB cards were supposed to be available this month, with 256MB cards coming out around Christmas and higher-capacity cards (eventually topping out at 8GB) in 2003 and beyond.
Personally, I'm waiting for Dr. Arroway's camera in the movie Contact:
"...we have your personal recording unit. Normal, infrared and ultraviolet lenses. Digital microchip, good for thousands of hours of recording."
Maybe that will be Nikon's response!
>Nikon understands the concept of an investment
Ahhh HAHAHAHAHA! ROTFLMAO! Now that's funny.
Nikon doesn't give two shits about their customers. Just ask anyone who owns an older model CoolScan. We trashed a few not so long ago because they worked fine, but Nikon won't devlop new drivers or touch the damn things. We lost a slide insert once. We ended up with a "spare" unit because Nikon doesn't make replacement parts for products that are more than a couple of years old.
Nikon is the shittiest company I've dealt with, barring Iomega.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
It is entirely subjective.
Take a good 8x10 from a good printer, on good paper.
Then take a good 8x10 photo-print on real photo paper, from real 35mm film. Or hell, even from 50mm (or whatever the professional standard is).
Now take out a magnifying glass.
Now you will see the difference.
Not the pros I know. Aside from Nat'l Geo contract pros who still (mostly) shoot slides, all the PJ's and pool reporters I know switched to digital long ago. Those guys used to spend more in a month on lab fees than they do in a year on bodies & lenses.
This includes freelance AP stringers, Washington Post pool reporters, and basically all of the pros that aren't making ''art''. And the latter are growing fewer and fewer due to the superior workflow from digital cameras. Curiously (to me), the guys who have stuck it out with film are Nat'l Geographic contract heavies (McCurry, Doubillet) and climbing photography pros. At least one guy I know who is a professional freelance photojournalist (don't laugh, he makes plenty of money doing it) and avid climber, still uses a film back for his climbing shots.
All this could change (a LOT) with the advent of affordable full-frame DSLRs. I know it's tempting me... and I'm just an amateur with a lot of lab fees to nudge me in that direction.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
They say it is a nikon lens mount, and from the picture i saw it looks fairly simmilar to an f5.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
for anyone in the market for a digital camera. Unless you a serious photographer a 2.1MP with a good zoomable optical lens will work fine for most people. Having 3MP can't hurt, but anything beyond that is overkill(financially) for most people.
Ask yourself this. How many 8x10 photos have you made and kept in the past few years? If your like the average consumer and do 4x6's and 5x8 's a good 2.1MP will do you well.
Plus keep in mind that A) you will need a high speed connection if you want to upload your photos to an online printer. My father realized that after buying a 3MP and trying to upload a roll of 30 via a 56k line which as we all know only does 33.6 up. Also realize that B) printing your own photos is very expensive and between the ink and paper really burn money.
So while its all good and well that these higher MP camera are coming out, the cost of the camera can really sometime be minimal over the other expenses you may incur.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
However, the imaging characteristics of film and digital are just different;
That's what I've been saying all along. For my money, digital cameras just won't compare to film until they can emulate various types of film stock. Just like I can get reverb, chorus and delay plug-ins for my audio editor, I'm not buying a digital camera until I can get (or it comes with) different plug-ins like "cheap polaroid" or "Tri-X" or whatever that all react to light (and specifically shadows and very bright light) and reproduce colors in the same way that those film stocks do.
c-hack.com |
Also try this article.
This camera will be better than film. As a pro writer/photographer who already shoots digital only at 4mp (EOS-1D), I can say that 35mm film is dead but for those quaint "vintage" photographers who are doing "art" stuff.
The amount of ignorance about digital and about photography in general here on Slashdot is shocking! These people may be geeks, but they understand little about optics, current sensor technology, film chemistry, or human perception of resolution and dynamic range.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It turns out that the D1X (and D1H and F5, etc) will all meter with any AI lens made. 105/1.8 is a lovely portrait lens, for example.
My F100 will also do this. You have to use spot metering, but what else would a Real Man use, anyhow?
Anyways, the point is that you don't know (enough about) what you're talking about.
AI lenses were first produced about 25 years ago, so at least on that count, you're quite right that an unmodified 30-year-old Nikkor won't be real useful. Of course, if it's a long telephoto, it might be worth converting anyways. Not everyone is a staff photographer for a newspaper with a good lens pool.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I can just picture in Koln, Germany right now...
Kodak: The numbers all go to thirteen. Look, right across the board, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen and -
Canon: Oh, I see. And most cams go up to eleven?
Kodak: Exactly.
Canon: Does that mean it's sharper? Is it any sharper?
Kodak: Well, it's two sharper, isn't it? It's not eleven. You see, most blokes, you know, will be shooting at eleven. You're on eleven here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on eleven on your camera. Where can you go from there? Where?
Canon: I don't know.
Kodak: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Canon: Put it up to thirteen.
Kodak: Thirteen. Exactly. Two sharper.
Canon: Why don't you just make eleven sharper and make eleven be the top number and make that a little sharper?
Kodak: [Pause] These go to thirteen.
(sorry)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
N80 or F80. Obviously, Nikon is saving it's high-end bodies for it self. :)
If I were going on a few weeks expedition over the Sahara, I would be very hesitating taking digital camera. These babies eat batteries like there is no tomorrow. I wouldn't leave civilzation with one. I think every photographer who ventures in a remote location of the earth will be nervous without at least one camera that works on musclepower only. (My Olympus OM-1 still works, I haven't put battery in it for years)
Minor correction it should say,
"Unless your a serious photographer a 2.1MP with a good optical zoom..."
The reason is an optical zoom truely magnifies the subject, while a digital zoom just blows up the same area and doesn't really optically magnify it. This can often result in a blurry picture. So in otherwords, don't user digital zoom.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
...is found here Roger N. Clark's photography page provides supurb comparisons and information comparing film grain resolutions, and including digital cameras in the mix.
Many pundits here have been instantly shouting that 16+megapixels are unnecessary. They are very wrong. 16 megapixels only approxomate 35mm-- and don't even come close to large-format film.
The comparison is educational & eye opening and EXTREMELY well documented, with pictures.
The readers digest version is that "From these tests, it is my opinion that digital cameras will match Fujichrome Velvi 35mm film when they reach more than about 10 megapixels. Somewhere in the 12-16 megapixels will produce color image quality comparable to 35 mm film (this is a compromise of more intensity detail and less color detail than film). Somewhat fewer megapixels, approximately 7-8 Mpixels will match 35mm film intensity detail but at below 35mm film color detail.
Medium format film: about 50 digital camera megapixels are need to match Fujichrome Velvia in 6 x 4.5 cm.
Large format: more than 200 digital camera megapixels are need to match 4x5 Fujichrome Velvia film. How much more needs futher testing. "
Thanks Roger N. Clark.
The EOS-1DS has a single CCD sensor. There was a rumor circulating for a while that it had two sensors, like an old and unsuccessful Minolta DSLR did a while back. The rumor turned out to be incorrect.
for those who can neither type nor pronounce Köln (with the funny dots above the o), the international / anglophile name of the city is Cologne.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Got confused for a sec.
This camera sounds like a great alternative. 3000 by 4000 pixel resolution means 400 dpi for a 10" text area (two pages of a book) and you need that resolution for good OCR'ing. The camera is portable--just bring a typewriter page holder to prop up the original, and fast: click! (turn page) click! (turn page) click!.
If I get the cash together I could imagine buying one just to use for stuff like this.
Uh, last time I checked two was the square root of four, not the square of four.
For example a 2.1MP camera only produces pictures @ 1600x1200 which contains 1,920,000 pixels. This is a ratio of about 10:11. This means that the 13.8MP camera gives pictures with approx. 12.5 Mpixels You do the math of figuring out the res.
[disclaimer]I am not into digital cameras, and all I know, I learned from this article, so don't fry me OK!!![/disclaimer]
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
Am I mistaken, or does this camera by Kodak have 16 megapixels?
(p.s. I don't have any lenses from the 1970s, but I'm still glad that my modest investment in recent af nikkor lenses will not be wasted when i move to digital)
So how much saving over film & developing charges? Well, 16000 pix / 24 pix = 666 (!) rolls of film. 666*$10 film & develop charges = $6,600. Thats the minimum it would have cost! And I probably shot at least two to three times that and tossed out the crap.
These cameras sound interesting, but I'm waiting to see how the foveon cameras turn out. The camera previewed there was recently announced to by $1800 for the body.
I have to think that buying a really high end diigtal camera in the next few years is only practical for a company with a lot of money - otherwise the imaging and storage technologies being developed and refined really make waiting worth while.
At the moment a good film scanner and camera are as appealing to me a digital system, and cheaper too. Plus film is a lot easier to deal with at the moment when travelling if you take more than a few hundred pictures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On a tripod, and assuming no subject movement, resolution will be limited by a combination of the film capability and the lens capability. This gets quite complicated because with conventional film the resolution degrades fairly gracefully. As the detail gets smaller lens contrast is lost, but also film contrast is lost because of scatter, flare, grain pattern. In theory a Leitz 50mm lens operating at around f/5.6 can achieve an equivalent of about 30MPx, but in practice nothing like this will be achieved by most subjects most of the time.
However, there are other fiddle factors. First, digital camera makers lie^x^x^x apply interpretation to their camera sensors. A camera advertised as 2.1MPx tends to have rather fewer actual working pixels, the rest is done by "interpolation", a process which involves removing artefacts, a degree of dither, and the fact that most image sensor cells, instead of having RGB sensor sites, have in effect RGBG with twice as many green, owing to the need for an XY matrix. It also loses performance because, having only a small photosensor, the lens design is compromised. All the years of 35mm lens development do not apply to the tiny short focussed lenses of small digital cameras.
Second, there is no direct equivalence between film photography, with its analog response (gradual degradation of image as detail gets smaller) and digital sensors which are all or nothing. Increased subject contrast increases resolution on analog cameras but can only increase the contrast on a digital sensor.
Finally, with a film camera you can increase resolution and image quality at the expense of light sensitivity by changing film.
My conclusion: I suspect that for most people most of the time something like a Canon G2 is perfectly adequate. But if you want to take high res photos on a tripod, if you need to use long or short focus lenses, if you want the highest color resolution, you need film.
Since you can currently get this quite easily, buy the G2 now, keep the 35mm system and wait till the pros start discarding their second hand bodies when the pixel count goes up to 22 or 30. There will be some bargains, and with your 35mm system you can always get the performance when you need it, using that old clunky silver technology.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Hmm. Nikon employee disses Canon, Kodak products. Nikon fanboy takes them at face value without reading the articles.
News at 11.
Throughout this thread people seem to be assuming that the whole picture will be printed out at a reasonable size. While there certainly is a limit to the number of useful megapixels in printing out a picture at 8 1/2 by 11 (I don't have the technical expertise to say where that limit is, and it will surely change as printer technology progresses), I look forward to being able to get good quality printouts from a small cropped portion of a picture. For example, taking a group shot of 20 or 30 people, and then printing out close-ups of each of the people photographed rather than taking 30 separate photos.
:) (Though I still haven't filled my twenty gig hard drive, and it's on it's last leg.) But I digress, my main point is that like many computer components, we are approaching quite comfortable, but more is always nice.
While I wouldn't pay thousands for this capability, I'll love having every megapixel I can get. It's like hard drive capacity, who could ever use 40 megs, I mean a gig, scratch that 20 gigs.
Don't get a Nikon Coolpix unless you're into frustrating user interfaces.
A Canon, Minolta, or Olympus would be good. The Canon S30/S40 are good. The Canon G2 is better, it's got an even brighter (wider, faster, etc) lens which helps for shots indoors without flash.
Spend as much as you can reasonably afford. There's never too much detail and you can't get more later. You can print your pictures later if you feel the need, but likely you'll keep all but a few wall-hanging ones on the computer. The savings from this will easily pay for the camera.
You probably won't be happy in the long run with Less than an Canon S40/G2 or comparable. You won't be able to make really clean 8x10s (important for the grandparents) and the better the camera, the more manual functions it'll have, letting you override it when you get better at photography. (And you will, a few thousand pics later, with the camera saving all the settings info for later perusal, and you can't help but learn.)
If you want more, specific info, reply to this. I don't want to get too wordy initially though.
http://www.guymichel.com/Test-Sigma.html
Pretty darn good, (as most digicams are these days, anyway) considering the circumstances.
J.
Since when $4000-$6000 became prosumer range? The only product you could possibly buy at that price range and still call it "prosumer" with a straight face is a beat up race car to use on weekend races.
Prosumer is actually on the $1000-$1200 range. ust go to an electronics store and see how many camcorders. SLRs and digicams cross over that price range.
Not a hell of a lot.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Get real.
Have you ever heard of a thing called a "light meter?"
I've got a 35/2 -- a superb lens. No, it doesn't meter on my crappy N80 -- but I *do* know how to (a)compensate for Sunny 16 and (b) use a light meter.
Besides, the bodies don't matter. It's the lenses. I know a lot of folks who'll trash their bodies, but I've yet to meet *anyone* who trashes lenses. Lenses are the real investment. And if you've got a fetish for a particular lens with a specific kind of film -- you'll reach for any body that fits the lens.
(My own fetish is an old 1960ish Russian Jupiter on a Leica M4-P. The lens is spectacular -- it gives a distinctive *look*.)
And ironically, I just got my new 3.1 MP Fuji S602 yesterday. *sigh, you really can't be top of the line very long, can you?
3 tech.asp for a technology overview slideshow. See some of the best digital pictures in the world for the proof that's inside that pudding. Of course, I'm still damn satisfied with my Fuji and its 3.1 MP ccd, 6MP output, .76 effective accurate resolution camera.
Anyway, I'm convinced that CCD cameras are dead. Nail in the coffin. Dead. Increaseing the pel count isn't going to fix what's wrong with digicam resolution: moire effects, off color pixels thrown everywhere in low light, low sensitivity (usually around ISO 400 or less; my camera has ISO 1600 capability but only at 1 MP -- 1280x800), fuzzy edges in precision shots due to the particulars of the CCD itself (red and blue sensors are necesarily half a pixel away from each other, meaning to get a truly sharp sample you have to divide the res by 4 (2x sampling)).
Which is why my next $2000 camera is going to have a Foveon sensor. See http://www.dpreview.com/news/0202/02021102foveonx
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I have always been an HP printer fan, having had an original DeskJet 500C, which gave way to a 6, 7, and recently a 9 series. Unfortunately, I saw the output of an Epson 785 and had to have it. It blew away the prints my HP made. I ended up getting the 820, since it's the same printer without the card reader.
The ink cartridges are a bit cheaper than the HP cartridges, and seem to hold more ink, the 6-color process makes photos look much better, and it has the ability to make borderless photos. For $99 (BEFORE the $20 Staples rebate) I don't think anything HP makes can touch it - and this is coming from a long-time HP fan, as I said before.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Someone, somewhere, should be working on inexpensive swappable "CPUs" that have the same performance as traditional supercomputers. It just doesn't make sense to be buying new computers everytime transistors can be made smaller. At the very least, someone needs to make the processors interchangeable, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon since chip companies like things the way they are.
I had a DC-210 for work, and it wasn't bad. I initially ended up with a DC-260, and it had problems. There was a red-magenta shift that really looked BAD when photographing outdoors - here's an example. Those are red cars, not magenta! Very Bad, Kodak.
It was slow to start, slow to focus, and bad with the color problem. I did like the photo clarity, though. They did even release a color fix which you could download into the camera, but it didn't actually do anything.
That camera died after 3000 or so photos, and it was better to replace it with something newer
or $999,999,999,999.00 on a Lamborghini Diablo
A trillion bucks for a Diablo? Damn inflation - I remember when they were only a quarter million!
Or did you mean a trillion lire? That would make sense, the Lamborghini being Italian and all, but that's still $500 million, or 2000x more than I'd pay.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
This guy has created 50 mega pixel images using current digital cameras!
:).
I guess his life will be 4 times easier
Also there is a preview of the cannon on www.dpreview.com
- Sam
Just from my angle, I prefer to use cameras in manual mode (meaning manual focus, f-stop, and shutter); I think it gets better pictures. This may because the autocameras I've used are stupid (I haven't had any experience with a better auto camera than what you find in a standard fairly-cheap non-SLR 35mm) and always a) underexpose, b) overexpose, c) leave the shutter open too long (blurring it), or d) a combination of the above (I even have one picture that is overexposed and underexposed at the same time - it was a dark subject in front of a window, and it overexposed the window and underexposed the subject). I assume that I would be happy most of the time with a good auto camera though.
So your statement that it's *useless* is silly. You just wouldn't have auto stuff.
(My experience with SLRs comes mainly from my mom's ~20 yr old Minolta)
Get 'em while they're hot! (note - Flash required)
Canon Japan's EOS-1Ds page
I wouldn't download the raw TIFFs though unless you have a use for them, and like 38MB images :) Sample 1 has brown splodges all over the wall areas, which I don't think are artifacts from the camera but rather markings on the walls themselves. I'm quite surprised that Canon didn't use some proper studio settings here for 1 & 2. Sample 3 also appears to have artifacts though at first glance, notice all along the left-hand side on the wall, on the colour chart and below the fruit, hmmmm... strange... I'll have to inspect the full-res. versions and see what I can find. Image sharpness around the edges looks good though, I guess Canon must have found a way round the CCD falloff?
I've got to say I'm damn impressed by these, I was unsure how the newer SLRs would fare, especially given the teething-troubles of the new Contax, but Canon have come up with a winner here IMHO. Think I'll stick with my EOS-3 until these babies come down in price a bit though !!Any AC's out there that know anything about the optics on satellites?
I had a neighbor who worked at lockheed and was a satellite engineer.... he was talking (in code of course) about some of the imaging capabilities of satellites.
how does 13.8Mp compare to the eyes in the sky? if we are going to get 13.8Mp at a semi-consumer level - what do the feds got above our heads and how do they compare. what type of optics do satellites use? and how good is the resolution - and how far/fine can they see?
You do realize that all of Kodak's professional Digital bodies are F5 bases, right?
And the D100 doesn't meter with non-CPU (AF or AI-P) lenses, neither does the F55/N55,F65/N65 and F80/N80, all other Nikon AF bodies will work with AI or later lenses.
Note that Pentax is even better for this, with 3 mounts, K (MF), KAF (Will only work with KAF lenses, bodies are low-end) and KAF2(Will work with all K lenses, bodies are mid-high Amateur range), so with the exception of their cheapest current bodies, any K mount lens will work on their newest cameras without modification.
Minolta and Canon have changed their mount once, going to a larger mount when they moved to AF. A good choice, as they weren't in the position that Nikon was, with professionals still using cameras from 1959 with current production lenses.
The Crazy Finn
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Well, I'm not worried. I've dealt with this since the early 80s.
I've moved data from 5.25s to 3.5s, and then to a HD. I've also waited just a little too long and had to jump through annoying hoops in getting some of the 5.25s transfered over so I know how annoying it can be to do. I won't make that mistake again. I've got disc images on the HD of my old floppies, and my old HD (it's a sparse image now, as I've deleted all the executables I've got on the big drive, and all the data I've moved over, but I've got the space so I'll keep it for a long time to be sure.)
I've got a little 20GB drive I use for backups. It's in the safe deposit box at the bank when I don't have it at home to put data on it.
I do burn CDs, but that's only for sending pictures to relatives. I wouldn't trust the flaky things for backup.
I've actually lost a lot of pictures in print form. My HDs stay in my computer (or the safe deposit box) and I'm not going to lose either of those.
As for viewing with the family, I find it's easier to cluster chairs around the computer (21" monitor) and flip through the pictures where everyone can easily see them. It helps that I store pictures by date and give them good names, I can find a picture among the thousands on the drive faster than I could flip through some awkward book.
It's also great for our relatives with bad eyes. You can zoom in easily on the people in the pictures and scroll around.
People just need to be aware of the backup issues and be careful. But just like you don't leave prints in direct sunlight and you keep track of the books when you move.
Printer DPI isn't directly related to on-screen pixels. Photo-quality inkjet printers such as Epson's have just six actual ink colors: cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, and black. Those are the primary subtractive colors. The "light" shades reduce the appearance of distracting speckled effects when printing areas of less saturated hues (like skies). Non-photo inkjets typically have only the basic four CYMK inks.
The printer uses various dithering techniques to create a gamut of colors as similar as possible to what you'd see on your monitor. But a single pixel of, say, bright orange, will require lots of dithered ink dots to create. The high printer resolution is still important, but what you're really getting are smoother and more accurate colors, and not necessarily more visible detail.
So in practice there's a point at which pumping more resolution to the printer won't result in any real improvement. With my aging Epson Stylus Photo 1200 my comfort level is usually somewhere between 200-300DPI.
How many people who buy a d1 do you think want to carry a seperate light meter? Not many. If they wanted to take good photos with accurate metering they wouldnt be using a 35 mm camera.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
THe whole point of the camera that this is based on, the F5, is that it is auto, if they didnt want it to be fancy auto everything they would have based it on an f3, not an f5. Paying $6000 for a manual 35mm style dslr, just seems a little rediculous.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
I've actually gotten ink from by 550C on my hands after I (stupidly) stored it vertically for a couple months, so I can attest that it's not complete BS. I wouldn't say it 'spilled' though; more like 'leaked'.
I'll respond to this since it doesn't cover other stuff. This is why I didn't calculate it at the full 1440, or even close to it. I don't really know what a typical print is now, but I did know it's well below the DPI given by manufacturers. That said, I didn't really know the relationship between DPI and PPI, which I do know, so thanks to those who explained it.