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

Uh-oh, here come the digital bashers.

[aussersterne]

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).

Consumer digital cameras are one thing... X3 is another (still hotly debated)... but most photo editors and labs out there right out agree that a Canon EOS-1D, EOS-D60, a Fuji S2 or a Nikon D1X or D100 is simply takes better pictures in nearly every regard (including resolution) than a 35mm film camera, with any brand or grade of film. With the latest range of full-frame cameras such as Canon's EOS-1Ds (11 megapixel, I believe) and Kodak's 14 megapixel offering, the distance between digital and film (with digital on top) will only increase.

And before you comment on other film sizes, realize also that many of the largest advertising companies shooting commercial spreads abandoned film long ago and are shooting with digital medium format or large format backs. Yes, many of the fashion or product spreads you see in your favorite checkout stand magazine are in fact digital these days.

Film is well on its way to becoming a playing for history hobbyists and an art tool for retro artists, and no amount of "ludditing" will change this.

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

[aussersterne]

See my earlier post about 1/16,000 shutter speed on an EOS-1D. It's great for sport shooting! I challenge you generate an "artifact" from movement at 1/2000, much less eight times that speed. Yes, we are talking digital.

The human eye? The human eye sees the print when it is finished, after the camera has captured it at such speeds. I challenge you to recognize anything with your "human eye" even if it is shown to you for a whopping 1/500 of a second!

Or are you talking about viewfinders? Pro digitals use glass, through-the-lens SLR viewfinders, just like film cameras. And consumer digital cameras (i.e. Olympus E line) are starting to use glass through-the-lens viewfinders, too.

If you're merely talking about the EVF (i.e. LCD) viewfinders in some consumer cameras, then you have a point -- these are difficult to use when framing a shot. But it has little bearing on the quality of the digital sensor itself or the quality of the image, and as I mentioned, no serious amateur or pro would buy a camera that uses an EVF anyway! Certainly not all digitals are saddled with this limitation, nor is it an inherent limitation of a digital camera.

People should become educated before they post, "Bub."

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

[old7]

I have worked extensively with both film and digital media. Two years ago I would have said the same thing. There is no way that tradition darkrooms will be able to compete with digital. I used to do a lot of special effects in the darkroom that I can now do with a computer in a fraction of the time and repeat the process limitlessly and flawlessly. My darkroom special effects where very good, but hit-and-miss and sometimes very difficult to duplicate.

MS Paint has been around since Win3.1, when was the last time you heard of an artist trading in their paintbrush for that?

Until printers can add the third dimension no one will put down the brush and pickup a mouse. I am willing to bet that you have seen digital art and thought it was from film. I thought that I would never give up my darkroom, but I may eventually have to darken the lights in the computer room to reminisce.

Old7

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

[SuperGrut]

Most people cannot tell which of my paintings I did digitally and which ones I did with watercolor unless I tell them. I have been doing less and less watercolor lately.

Even though I am familiar with both I have a hard time telling the difference in other people paintings.

I have been using Corel's Painter mostly but I also use photoshop. check out
http://mhatton.deviantart.com/ for some examples.

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

[speleo]

I have a D100 and have had a D30 and will probably pick up a D1x in the near future.

I don't believe all the hype. Beside the obvious problem of how are you going to read these digital files (I assume you're using the RAW file format to get 12-bit color data) 50 years from now, I skeptical of claims that the current 6-megapixel or even 11-megapixel cameras can match the resolution of a properly exposed drum-scanned 35mm Velvia slide. And it'll be quite some time before digital can match the resolution and tonality of an 8x10 large-format film image.

Clipping the highlights and a limited dynamic range are still problems in the current crop of cameras, too.

And these things are expensive. Sure it'll come down, but I don't think the price of a computer system capable of editing and processing these 30 MB+ images files is going to get much cheaper. And you're going to need a wopper of a RAID to archive these images. Remember, CD-ROMs are only good for 10 years or so.

But, you're right--film photography is soon to be an alternative process. Most pros have little reason to stick with film since they can capitalize the cost of the equipment and make up the cost on savings in film processing and quicker turnaround.

Mom and Dad love digital as they can print and email family pictures to everyone and create their own christmas cards.

And grandparents love digital as they can get emailed pictures of all the grandkids as often as they'd like.

And they're all going to hate digital when all the pictures go poof when their cheap Windows machine crashes taking all the family photos with it. Backup, that much data? By Mom and Dad? I don't think so.

Many fine-art photographers, especially those using medium and large-format and B&W, are going to be sticking with film for quite some time.

And that's cool. I'm sticking with film for my medium and large format B&W work myself.

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

[Simon Brooke]

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.

My Canon A1 has sat on the shelf for about two years now; the only time it's been used has been when the digicam (Olympus C2100UZ) was away for repair. Yes, the Canon is a slightly better camera and at the limits takes bettwe pictures - the Olympus is slightly flimsy, its viewfinder isn't really good enough for precise manual focus and its autofocus isn't always trustworthy. But the Olympus is far more versatile and far more useable. I take far more photographs with it. As to the range of photograhic situations it's useful for, I've taken a lot of wildlife photographs, including dragonflies and other insects. I've taken a lot of night-time landscapes, moonlight and starlight shots. I've taken literally hundreds of photographs from and of fast moving boats in bumpy water. And of course I've taken the usual photos of house, friends, pets, etc.

As for resolution, 1600x1200 pixels is good enough for 8"x10" photos and doesn't look too bad blown up even further; obviously it isn't as good as 2000x3000. But for the amateur photographer the digi wins every time. It's lighter and more conenient to carry around, while still having as wide a range of focal lengths (equivalent of 38mm to 400mm) as I've ever carried. It takes snapshots without need for thought; and if you want to set things up to take a proper photograph, control over everything - shutter, aperture, focus, focal length - is there.

You'll get the little Olympus for the same $500ish you were quoting for an SLR kit, but provided you use rechargeable batteries that's all you'll pay. With an SLR, every shot you take costs film and processing, so if like me you take several thousand photographs a year that easily adds up to more money than the camera.

The next camera I buy will have a metal chasis and a proper optical viewfinder. It will also be more optimised for manual focus than the Olympus. But it will definitely be a digital - there's no way I'm going back to film.

Astrophotography?

[SoCalChris]

Since this new chip is able to gather more light than traditional CCD chips, I would imagine that there will be some interesting uses for it in astrophotography. Instead of having to use a CCD imager with a 30 minute exposure to get an image, wouldn't you technically be able to get a higher resolution pic with this a lot quicker?

That's just a thought...

Re:Astrophotography?

[tjwhaynes]

Since this new chip is able to gather more light than traditional CCD chips, I would imagine that there will be some interesting uses for it in astrophotography. Instead of having to use a CCD imager with a 30 minute exposure to get an image, wouldn't you technically be able to get a higher resolution pic with this a lot quicker?

All the serious astrophotography I've done has been carried out with single waveband CCDs and filters, rather than colour CCDs so you would get an equivalent depth of image with the old style CCDs to the new X3 sensor for the same exposure time. However, the X3 sensor provides the advantage of doing three bands simultaneously but I would want to see the data sheets for the wavebands for each layer to see whether it could be used for colour measurements. I suspect that if you want more than just a good colour piccy, you are stuck with the R, G, Gb, B, V, etc. filters.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

P.S. in case you wondered which telescope I used for my astrophotography take a look :-)

Re:digital print...

[angle_slam]

That's all great and all... but until there's affordable printing solutions that can print better than film, there won't be as widespread adoption.

The minilab system that is widely regarded as the best is the Fuji Frontier system. How does it work? By scanning film. Of course, it accepts files from digital cameras as well.

What is the best way to get large, "professional" prints? The Lightjet. How do these operate? Using very high quality scans! (See West Coast Imaging, for example). My point? You can already get digital images produced in the exact same manner as the best film prints.

There are already a lot of people who think digital photography has surpassed even medium format photography. See the Luminous Landscape, for example.

As for widespread adoption, photojournalists have all but abandoned film. The P&S crowd is already beginning to abandon film.

Re:Pixel Noise

[rendermouse]

Read a bit about The Color-Sensitive Cones

"In 1965 came experimental confirmation of a long expected result - there are three types of color-sensitive cones in the retina of the human eye, corresponding roughly to red, green, and blue sensitive detectors. "

The human eye?

[kaphka]

I hate to break it to y'all, but in the human eye, each spot in the fovea is occupied by one receptor, which is maximally sensitive at one wavelength -- in other words, it works the way that current digital cameras work. (Random Googled link.) I suppose that if the human eye needed to determine the color of a particular "pixel", it would have to interpolate, just like a CCD camera... but that's a moot point, because that doesn't actually happen in our visual system. (It's much, much more complicated than that.)

Now, this technology does sound like a great way to increase the resolution of digital cameras, if it's feasible. However, all this "neuromorphic" stuff is pure marketing. (Though I admit that "Foveon" is a clever name.)

Whats the hold up?

[cosmosis]

The X3 announcement came out almost a year ago, and still their is only one, ONE camera that has this technology. If its so superior (which is it by the way!) then why the hell hasn't this thing been flooding the market? It defies description.

In fact, earlier this year the announcment was that we should see several cameras with X3 technology on the store shelves in time for Christmas. What happened?

Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.

Quantum efficiency

[suitti]

Continuous tones per pixel is good. But, one nice thing about CCDs is their high quantum efficiency. This helps in low light conditions and with fast action. As I understand it, CMOS detectors aren't as good. But, with three layers to draw on, it may be improved. Is it?

Warning! Marketting Hype

[the eric conspiracy]

There is no way this camera sees like the human eye - this sensor arrangement is completely different from the rod/cone structure of the human eye. A conventional digicam is actually closer than this is.

As far as this camera comparing it to film - more baloney. A good 35 mm camera on a tripod is capable of somewhere 11-14 megapixels of in a conventional digital camera. This particular sensor does not deliver resolution in that ballpark.

Interesting Technology

[TygerFish]

I don't know about advertiser's claims and frankly scarlet... What I see when I look at these pictures is a camera that takes some very good pictures. True, it could probably use better *something* but even at high resolutions the images I saw seemed pretty good for the most part.

Sure, Sigma is not stellar quality, but those images werevery vibrant.

Re:Sadly...

[ckaminski]

Right, but with a patent on this particular application of sensor technology, unless Nikon and Canon and other CCD manufacturers come up with some RADICAL improvement to this layered CCD, then they're going to have to stick to high megapixel dense mosaic CCD's. Yields are going to be small for quite a while on those 24 MP CCD's.

Odds are the reason Nikon and Canon didn't announce Foveon based cameras has more to do with production capacity of the foveon sensor than the technical aspects of said sensor. Why should Nikon be the one to field test Foveons manufacturing capability? Let some other vendor suffer the pain of the first generation implementation. It's what I'd do were I Nikon or Canon... Who wants another Nikon D1-x availability fiasco?

Could it also have something to do with the whole Not Invented Here syndrome? U.S. based CCD manufacturer, Japanese based camera manufacturers? I imagine based on current economies that the Foveon sensor is a LOT more expensive than Far Eastern produced CCD's...

Then again, I could just be talking out my ass... :-)

-Chris

Neat, but not essential

[ChaosDiscord]

It's a neat technique to increase resolution, but the implication that the article gives that you need this technique to improve resolution is silly. Effectively each grouping of red, green, and blue sensing points in a CCD camera returns a single pixel. If you replace each red sensor with three smaller sensors (one red, one green, and one blue), you'll get the same increase in resolution. In theory you could lose data because a little bit of blue light hit the red sensor, but not the blue one, but in practice it isn't an issue. Assuming you can keep making the sensors small, you can keep scaling the resolution of CCD technology.

This is neat technology and may well improve the quality of cameras to come. But it's not essential to improving the quality of cameras.

Re:Pixel Noise

[Arthur Dent]

Actually, there are four.

Another possible effect of having two X-chromosomes is that a woman who is a carrier for colour-blindness might have one X-chromosome with red and green and one with green and a different green. Her son, who has only the two green pigments, is colour blind. But the woman herself may have cone cells for blue, red, green and the extra green. Instead of having the usual three dimensions of colour she might have four. She would be a tetrachromat.

Re:It's like the eye because...

[SuperKendall]

No, I am getting cought up in the actual images which to me exhibit fantastic detail and utter lack of color moire. The low light capabilites are not that great (at the moment) it is true...

As a PHOTOGRAPHER, what I think of by "sees like the human eye" is that the end result (far more important to me than the means of reaching that point) exhibit sharpness and "true color", which to me means "no color moire" (which I almost never see with my own eye in real life, but I get to see all the time in digital photos). Ideally it would also mean no noise or grain, but while there is some noise it's still better than grain from what I can see.

I was sticking with film SLR's, but the X3 real images have impressed me enough that I'm going to get an SD9 fairly soon I think. I went back and forth between the SD9 and S2 Pro, but real images have won me over to the X3 based camera. For the kind of photography I like to do (landscapes and architecture, just like just about every other photographer on the planet it seems) it's a fine camera.

You're missing the larger issue

[john82]

The continuing downfall of all things digital/electronic: retention. We keep upgrading, changing formats, algorithms, software, etc. Think of all the articles here about losing data because it's in a format that's no longer supported. Or because the storage media has a shelf life. Nine (or even eight) track tape, 8 and 5.25" floppies for example. Note the increasing difficulty finding a player for these?

We've got images from the earliest days of photography. Brady's pictures from the Civil War. Written word lives on from centuries ago because the original media was substantial if not borderline immutable.

Magnetic-based media is ephemeral. So far that's the REAL problem. Combine modern analog rendering (X3) with a modern analog(?) storage medium and we may have the next ink and vellum.

Re:It's like the eye because...

[Eight 01]

Yep, your original statement required the use of "some sort of spacial sampler" which is what the overlaying grids are. Well, I understood what you meant.

I have seen moire with just my eyes, though rarely. I used to ride the bus every day and there was a tall building that stood out in the distance. It's facade was alternating light and dark stripes, which at a great distance would show as moire'd. The resolution needed to discern the detail would dip below my eye's resolution, and I'd see a shimmering.

The human eye has very sophisticated firmware (how about that blindspot!) which digital cameras don't have yet.

Achilles' heal

[Steve525]

I just finished reading the review at dpreview. (Thanks to all the people who posted the link). There may be a serious issue with this technology. In the review they mention "color clipping". Once one of the color channels reaches saturation, all color information is lost. This may be inherent in the X3 design.

The detector works by the difference in absorption of the colors of light. The first layer sees a lot of blue, with some green and red. The next layer sees a lot of green with some red and a little blue. The last layer sees a lot of red with only a little blue and green. What this means is that in order to determine the true colors of the reverse of this process needs to be calculated. However, if any of the detectors saturate (and the first is the most likely one), there probably is no accurate way to do this reversal. Currently, it looks like the camera makes these pixels grey, which looks aweful. They will need to come up with a better way of estimating the color of these pixels if this technology is to work well, and I have no idea if that's possible.

Note that a standard CCD with separate pixels can also have one of it's channels saturate. In this case, however, the pixel will simply become whiter than it should, which looks natural.

What about black and white?

[BrittPark]

I come not to bash digital. I have a 5700 and love it. It's wonderful for color work and for most practical purposes is just as good as film. However if one is a serious photographer working in black and white, digital doesn't quite cut it, but not for reasons of resolution (though I don't think anyone's manufacturing a camera with the resolution of Tech-Pan on 4x5 ;) or dynamic range but because there is no output medium (that I know of) that can produce the beauty, resolution, dynamic range of a silver (or platinum/palladium) print. Perhaps in the future there will be service angencies who will print b&w from digital originals, but the market for such a service is so small ...

Good points

[SuperKendall]

That is a good point that noise is error in a way that grain is not... I would like the SD9 to have noise levels like the S2 pro (which is great in low light) but given what I like to shoot (landscapes and architecture mostly) I will be happy enough with what the SD-9 can do. One of the things I like about noise on the X3 is that at least the noise doesn't result in distracting colors like you get when individual CCD sensors have a different level of noise... I'm not sure if each "layer" of the X3 sensors have similar noise character (where each layer has its own problems) or if they are more in line with each other, resulting in less color loss from noise.

The artifacts you talk about worry me a little too, I have been reading the Sigma SLR forum on DPreview now for a while and I have seen some samples with color fringing and washed out greens. The green problem in particular seems to be an overexposure thing and so I think can be managed with careful exposre. I'm not sure what is going on with the fringing, hopefully that will improve as they fine-tune the firmware. Also, I think there is some open question around what the Sigma software itself is doing with the raw data - the open source raw converter is handy in that you can take a raw sigma image, turn it into a PPM, and examine it from there. I've been starting to do that to make the final descision about this camera.

I do think having to have grain in a photo to accept it is something that will change over time as people become less and less used to seeing images with grain. It seems like a lot of professional images you see around now are very smooth with nothing like grain or noise, but perhaps even these have subtle amounts I haven't noticed, and you get texture of soome sort from some printing processes.

Re:It's like the eye because...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got caught in the digital hype once before, pardon me for being cautious. This was with the original Canon Optura. Back in 1997 this came out accompanied by claims that the single CCD with a RGB pass filter "rivaled 3-ccd color." After $2750 I found out that was an exaggeration. With the filtration the CCD required 20 lux to register an image with 1500lux(!!!) recommended. While that is a video camera example, it applies directly to your situation. I will wager the foveon is inefficient with light and requires a lot of it to register "real color." I am a photographer (as in, it pays all my bills) and you would do well to take a look at what is in my camera bag. Two Canon 1Ds'. Never seen a moire with any subject in any light, and for that matter with the 1D. More power to Foveon, if their system can honestly beat this I will switch to Sigma as fast as I changed from the Nikon digital system to Canon. As a professional I must offer the finest product possible.