Improving Digital Photography

Milican writes "'It's easy to have a complicated idea," Carver Mead used to tell his students at Caltech. "It's very, very hard to have a simple idea...And now one of Mead's simplest ideas--a digital camera should see color the way the human eye does--is poised to change everything about photography. Its first embodiment is a sensor - called the X3 - that produces images as good as or better than what can be achieved with film.'" We had a previous story about Foveon last February.

Comments

Re:Pixel Noise

[tgibbs]

This foveon system is like the human eye inasmuchas the light photons penetrate multiple layers and register at more than one levels in the same spot.

Uh, no. Only one of those layers actually registers light--the others are just "wiring" (yes the mammalian eye actually runs its connections in front of its light sensors). Actually, it is less like the way the eye works. That doesn't mean that it isn't better, however. The notion that a camera should work like an eye is fundamentally misguided--would you wanted a camera that only captured color and high resolution at the very center of the image, and was low resolution black & white every where else?

Re:Hubble?

[afidel]

High quality extremely expensive digital imaging devices are extremely good at capturing low amounts of light, but for consumer cameras the noise level in the electronics is too high so low light captures get faded out by the natural noise in the signal. Most CCD's used for astonomy are cooled through some means, usuall liquid nitrogen to bring the noise level in the sensor down to small fractions of what they would be at room temperature. This also leads into one of the negative points of the foveon tech which is that its noise floor is about 3 times higher than the cmos tech that Canon is using in their cameras like the D-30 and D-60.

Re:Uh-oh, here come the digital bashers.

[harrkev]

Before all of the replies saying that digital is for geeks and film will forever rule, please be sure that you have used current and professional quality digital gear, including 35mm gear made by Canon or Nikon with standard lens mounts, digital medium or digital large format backs (depending on the type of vs. film comparison you plan to make).

I disagree. You can put together quite a nice film-based SLR system for around $500-800 or so (camera and lenses -- tripods/bags/filters extra). To get similar quality from a digital SLR would add at least $1000 (probably more) to the price tag. $1000 will buy a lot of film and processing. I am sticking with film for now.

I don't want to star a flame war, but look at resale prices for digital vs. film. Even 20-year-old film cameras can still command a respectable resale value. A 3-year-old digicam is almost considered worthless these days.