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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.
How is this at all like the way the human eye sees?
I hate pixel noise in my digital pictures. I have heard that since red color has to be detected at the deepest part of the silicon there is an abudance of noise in the reds.
0xfeedface
wait till a few years down the road once he's up to X10!
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in Photography. Check out the article here.
Random is the New Order.
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.
For those of you interested in a review of a X3 camera and a simple explanation of the technology behind it, this review is pretty decent.
I've talked to a few people who have used the Foveon Sigma and while they rave about the technology, the can't stand the camera for handling, feature set, etc.
What Mead needs to do is play whatever game Canon/Nikon/Minolta/Olympus wants him to play to get his chip in their cameras. Then it'll really take off.
for an excellent (as usual) review of a camera based on this sensor check dpreview
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sigmasd9/
-- the cake is a lie
"It's very, very hard to have a simple idea."
I don't know about anyone else, but this GW Bush bashing is getting a little tiresome.
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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.
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I also think it should be noted that this Popular Science article (and the submitted article) make it clear that it wasn't Carver Mead who invented it/thought of it but Dick Merrill who thought of it and Dick Lyon who brought the dream back to life after Merrill forgot about it. Mead just founded Foveon Inc.
Random is the New Order.
It sees a real "color" instead of on red/green/blue (dispersed in fine pixels of course). It may not be able to see red quite as well as other colors, but it only means that the sensitivity at the red level is the limitation you have for the picture as whole.
What you don't get is Moire patterns - at all!! That is what you probably hate when you say you hate "pixel noise" because it's totally obvious (due to the color changes), very distracting, and annoying to clean up after.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So here is how digital cameras currently "see" light. (Color being different frequencies of light waves):
The light comes in through the lens.
The light is filtered through the charged coupled device (CCD).
This is where photons are translated to pixels. (Terry Pratchett readers will call this the painting demon.) This is also where all of the non-lens work is done. (White Balance, Compression, Color Interpretation, Sharpness, Saturation)
The resulting data is written to an image file with all sorts of fun Exif information (image tag info.) and
Voila! A new image is born.
All of this research is going in at the CCD level. I am interested to see how well it compares to the trained photographer's eye's interpretation of color.
Art=!Elephant Shit.
If I look at an object of [presumably] fixed colour, I actually see slightly different colour tints with each eye.
If it is of any relevance, my Iris' are also not well defined in colour - my left eye is predominantly green, whilst my right eye is obviously more bluey (but nowhere near as blue as a person with "blue" eyes).
I can pass all colour blind tests with, er, flying colours.
Can anybody provide some insight about that?
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The Foveon sensor has been much hyped, and due "any time now" for years. Well, it's finally here, being used in a digital SLR by Sigma. It does indeed seem to have a lot of potential, but it's not perfect yet. Basically, camera makers need to play with it some more to get their firmware exactly right. Also, the sensor itself isn't as sensitive in low light as current models. But it's competitive already. Future versions should be even moreso, but it depends on how much it can be improved, and at reasonable cost. Only time will tell...
http://www.sigma-photo.com/ -- an actual manufacturer.
This is an incredibly awesome technology and I wish against wishing i could just drop in my Fuji and go with it rather than having to drop about $3k when the tech makes the rounds to Fuji/Canon/Minolta. This really is what digital photography needs, it's going to be as big a boost to the market as was the single lens motion picture camera or kodachrome. No more moire, no more "interpolation," no more expensive low light high sensitivity CCDs, cameras using this can be cheaper because of this. Less jaggies. All the minor stuff that's keeping film afficianados out of the digital age are going to go away.
Of course, for joe q megapixel, there's going to be no benefit whatsoever. It's not going to make the digital zoom better or make the software to send 640x480 snapshots of the baby's ass to grandma any easier. And this may be the reason why the biggest names haven't touched this now year old technology. Or it could be that they're trying to find a way out of licensing it...Fuji'll probably adapt their own kickass "hexagonal" pixelalignment to the idea of single pixel tech and make a good product that much better.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I'd be cheaper for me to just gain the ability to hold my damn current digital camera still while taking a picture. That would improve the pictures of my pooch 100%.
----- "Blame the guy who doesn't speak English." -- Homer J. Simpson
The feature set is supposed to be pretty good, according to DPReview. The only real complaints they had about the camera were the red noise, and poor behavior in low light conditions. The camera had some really nice features including "undo last delete", histograms for each of the coolor channels, and even the ability to zoom in on an area of the pictures while examining the histogram to get a histogram for a small region of your photo. The software that comes with the camera is also supposed to be very good (though I have no idea if it works in OSX yet).
Over at Photo.net people seem to like some of the Sigma lenses pretty well. The 70-200 I think, is supposed to be a fine lens and people use it on other bodies all the time.
I agree I would have liked to see a Nikon or Canon body with this chip, but given that's probably a year or two off I'm probably going to buy the SD9 as my first digital SLR.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A good review is at dpreview.com (skip to conclusion if you're in a hurry).
This technology still has a way to go, but the SD9 certainly is an interesting camera.
One huge problem is with adaptation - Sigma makes consumer-grade lenses and cameras, some of which are of poor quality (but quite affordable). For these cameras to be adapted by professionals, Sigma need to create a camera with Canon or Nikon mounts, but furthermore, they need to erase the stigma attached to their equipment by many professional photographers.
If they were to make a full-frame sensor in a Canon mount that worked better at higher ISOs, this camera would be a huge seller.
It doesn't matter if it compares to that. Cameras like that are both uncommon and impractical.
If you got an array of these sensors that was 8"x10" do you think your camera would compare to it?
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...
Great, now I can stop scanning in those 21Mpixel images from film, and get a 10Mpixel digital camera. Since it uses 3 layers, those pixels must count for more than twice as many from the 35mm film. And the dynamic range is surely greater tha slide film. Finally the shadow detail in that otherwise brightly lit scene that I needed to use slide film, and capture at 48bit can be resolved with a 24bit image! Now I won't need more memory - my files will be 1/4th the size, and look just as good!
And it sees just like we do! Same 3 colors, same intensity relations, all on each pixel! Because everyone knows the human eye has only one kind of sensor in it. It's not like mammal eyes that have rods and cones.
Sorry, film will be around a little longer....
- dave f.
From the X3 link
"A Dramatically Different Design
The revolutionary design of Foveon X3 image sensors features three layers of photodetectors. The layers are embedded in silicon to take advantage of the fact that red, green and blue light penetrate silicon to different depths--forming the world's first full-color
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
While an excellent review, if you're just looking for a good sense of what the sensor can do without reading all twenty four pages (and completely slashdotting dpreview), check out this page.
The net-net of the review is that it's a great sensor, very accurate, the camera as some first-generation issues, and, of particular interest to this audience, uses a proprietary x3f raw image format that must be converted with Mac or Windows software.
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If you bother to read the article, you'll find that they are comparing it favourably with 120mm. But then, you're really only interested in telling us that yours is 8"x10", aren't you?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.)
MSK
Hmm, when I read reviews it listed the SD9 as having 3.34 megapixels, however it really has over 10 million. What I think the reviewers are doing is assuming that only 1/3 of the 10 million pixels are one of red, green or blue. This is true for other digital cameras, but not for this particular camera.
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t's pixelated still so you will still get Moire patterns as soon as the smallest details are finer than the resolving power of the X3 bins (think Nyquists theorem). However, the bizarre colours you get from a fine-grained black and white grid shouldn't be present to the same extent as all the measurements of colour intensity are done at the same point in the X3 layer, as opposed to the different spatial positions of the red green and blue bins in a colour CCD.
The bizzare colors (what I really hate about digital photos) are not just reduced - they are gone. If you read the review at DPReview.com you'll find that it has resolution right up to Nyquist is noise free and you get some detail beyond. Here's the relevant section (near the very end of the review, where they test against some resolution charts):
The SD9 is capable of delivering all nine individual lines of the horizontal or vertical resolution bars up to its maximum absolute resolution (sensor vertical pixel count) and slightly beyond. Note also that because the X3 sensor doesn't need a color filter array it doesn't suffer from color moiré.. Absolute resolution is just less than the Canon EOS-D60, Nikon D100 and Fujifilm S2 Pro (at 6 mp).
However, because the X3 sensor doesn't use a low pass (anti-alias) filter it is able to resolve detail all the way up to Nyquist. Beyond Nyquist the system will alias without any objectionable color moiré. Where a Bayer sensor camera would turn detail beyond Nyquist (such as distant grass texture) into a single plane of blurred color the SD9 will continue to reproduce some individual pixel detail (without color moiré).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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?
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just testing a theory...
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Film still rules for taking pictures in low-light.
So that's why the shuttle keeps visiting the Hubble Space Telescope, to pick up the film!
The is also a company called SBIG that makes a line of digital imagers for amatuer astronomers.
Steve M
As much as Foveon's well hyped and widely advertised (*cough*thanksslashdot*cough*) idea seems to make sense on the surface, their solution is far from perfect.
To sense an RGB (Red, Green, Blue) pixel one can use a veriety of methods. At the center of this technology lies the ability to turn a stream of photons into an electric current. This photodetector is colorblind, it is only capable of measuring the _amount_ of light, not it's color. To recognize color the estheblished method used to be to put several photodetectors near each other and put color filters in front of them. The most widely used color filter array is known as the Bayer pattern and consists of 2 green photodetectors (diagonal from each other) a blue and a red detector in a 2x2 grid. These 2x2 blocks are then repeated over and over to create the full image sensor.
Specialized software or hardware needs to take these individual Red, Green or Blue pixels and recreate a single RGB pixel, this technique is known as demosaicing. The major advantage of this method is the simplicity of the photodiode (photodetector). It allows for the creation of very dense image sensors that are now passing the 10MegaPixel barrier while keeping the cost down (start seeing 5MegaPix sensors for less then $100 before the end of this year).
Foveon's approach is to layer these color filters vertically.
The good:
- idealy you get R,G,B at each pixel.
The bad:
- very complex layered photodiode technology, this makes the pixels significantly bigger. Currently the pixels are bigger then a 2x2 bayer image pixel. The complexity also adds to the manifacturing cost, these chips will not be cheap for the forseable future.
- Color bleeding. For example: Photons in the green wavelenght do not nescecarily stop in the green layer, but might be picked up by the underlying red layer. This means that specialized hardware needs to apply a non-trivial color correction for each pixel layer.
Foveon's idea is a very interesting approach. Since they nicely pattented their idea shut, we will have to patiently wait for this single company to provide the world with this technology.
Side fact: The human eye see's colors using pigments that respond differently to different wavelengths. In the simplest model we can say that we see Red Green and Blue with spatially seperated pigments that resemble a bayer image sensor closer then the foveon's sensor.
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?
-- Stephen.
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.
You didn't ust have an earlier story about Foveon, you had an earlier story about exactly this sensor. Geeze at least wait for a new development before posting an article.
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.
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To buy such sensor you'll probably have to mortgage your home and sell your family to slavery, but still.
Too much hype. All they did was stack pixel detectors rather than mosaic them. The mosaic was simpler and now cheaper, this thing costs $1800 in a camera, else I'm sure someone could've come up with it. The real accomplishment is creating those silicon layers precisely, not coming up with lets stack em
They say the resolution is like a 120mm film, and the color lattitude is big. So are CMOS sensors in Canon and Nikon's cameras. Checkout the awesome photos on photo.net. A lot of those have been shot by modern digital cameras with CCDs and they dont look bad. Mead has his own marketing to do to try and take Foveon to Intel and Microsofts level, so he has to push down CCD. Theres a reason why people are buying digital cameras with sensors smaller than fingernails and submitting their pictures on professional photography site. I think Mead has work to do.
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I've seen a number of posts now that note the eye has seperate color receiving cones - while true, I have to wonder why it is humans do not see color moire? Although physically the CCD might be closer to how the eye is constructed, the end result (what we actually see) seems to be much more similar to the X3 sensor.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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Also, since film is analog, it is possible to acheive higher than expected print qualities. Digital is set, and you get the same quality each time you take a picture.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, but film is limited by grain in the same way that digital is limited by resolution. It's easy enough to take a blurry photo with film or digital, and then with a tripod and adjusting the aperature get a much better shot with either system...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First off, you need not be so rude to others, second the X3 claims to reduce Moire patterns, and it certainly claims to get rid of them in more places than digital cameras, which pick up Moire patterns that the human eye does not pick up. I could in fact point out to you why much of what you said is wrong, but I won't becuase it's only on the X3 website, which you clearly have not read. And by real color, I guess the term 'More Accurate' color should have been used.
Lastly, lighten up. It's disheartening to see stranger's ferociously pounce on someone for such a triffle.
Photos.
What you see on Photo.net is a poor shadow of the real quality, making it hard to really tell how good the original pictures are generally. You have a limit of 800 pixels in either diirection, but even worse each photo is limited to 100k in size. That means you have to use some pretty serious JPEG settings to make them fit (in one case, I had to use a quality setting of 40(!) to get a picture down that far, at which point it looked like hell).
Any color moire, softness, or other artifacts are hidden behind the small resolutions and high compression (I think the need for heavy JPEG compression is why some of the best photos there are landscapes with lots of graident colors, which compress well). That said, there are some really nice photos there!! After a visit I always feel humbled...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The resolution (as determined by number of pixels) will not get better. Manufacturers are currently counting each one-color pixel in the
RG
GB
blocks as one. That block is 4 pixels. Foveon-based cameras would have
(RGB) (RGB)
(RGB) (RGB)
which is still 4 pixels, but gives you more accurate color information at each pixel and reduces moire. So, while there will not be any more pixels per area with Foveon CCDs, the *effective* picture resolution will be much better.
I wish I had known this before I shopped for digicams-- it feels like false advertising to me, and I learned after I had made my purchase. Manufacturers ought to be required to state "4 single-color Megapixels" or "1 Megapixel effective with color" for 4MP cameras with traditional CCDs.
The Foveon images are nice, but frankly, I'd much rather have a 9 megapixel regular sensor than a 3 megapixel Foveon sensor: on most images, the 9 megapixel sensor is going to give you better resolution, and on images where it is worse, it will be only slightly worse (assuming the anti-aliasing and color processing is done correctly).
I think Drs. Hoffman and Leary had white papers about the subject....
This is amazing technology, and it will revolutionize digital cameras if/when it comes down in price. HOWEVER, this is not how the human optic system works. Even in our optics, we have seperate receptors for red, green, and blue, and our brains do the interpolating. As most will remember from basic elementary biology, our eyes detect light through rods and cones. All quotes are from this link. "The retina has ~126 million photo receptors, 120 million rods and 6 million cones." Rods gather any light they can, and compile the data together to show the best possible image in the dimmest light; therefore, rods will display a black and white image. This is why the darker it gets, the harder it is to differentiate yellow from white: you are depending more and more on the rods.
HERE is where it gets interesting, and where I get to my point. Cones are what we use to see color. An individual cone cannot see red green and blue as this marketing hype would lead us to believe. "The cones come in three types: Red (60%), Green (30%) and Blue (10%). The red and green cones are randomly distributed in the center of the fovea and the blue cones form an annulus around the outside." So in effect this camera will actually surpass the human eye.
As a side note, the link goes to a very interesting document that states how "126 million photoreceptors must be transmitted to the brain via 1 million fibers in the optic nerve [while] [t]he overall compression ratio of 126:1 is not evenly distributed." Check it out.
The X3 really has no color moire at all. Check the dpreview.com review that others have links for, look at the resolution comparison chart section (very near the end of the review).
It's true with pixels you'll see some aliasing, and of course you'll stiill have noise.
Now what I am wondering is why humans do not themselves see color moire more often because of the way the eye works. I am really not even close to an expert on how the human vision system really works (though I do know about how the rods and cones are structured, I don't know what happens with the data). Does anyone have an example of how you can trick the eye into seeing color moire (not just plain moire).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In classic CCD digital cameras, there is an array of RGB pixels. many of these chips come from the same manufacturerd, and what differentiates one camera from another are the algorithms within the camera to take the captured light waves at each pixel and calculate what that wave would be on surrounding pixels. This process is called interpolating the color. Often times the process of interpolation will produce pixel noise, referred to as 'Artifacts' among digital imaging professionals. There are ways to eliminate artifacts, but it's a pain.
Cameras have existes for several years that have a "monochrome" chip. These cameras shoot through colored filters to capture red, green, and blue fields and then stitch the colors together to form a composite image. No interpolation has to take place in this situation
The problem with this method is that it is only good for shooting still-life product shots. Add something in as simple as a lit candle and you end up with color ghosting (the channels of color do not line up exactly because at the moment of the capture the flame may be flickering)
In the case of this chip, each image pixel is reading all three light waves and understands color at each pixel. No calculations need to be done on the color to "fake it" in between pixels, so no image artifacts, or pixel noise occurs.
True. Film has its benefits. I wouldn't dream of photographing landscape professonally with digital, although it is getting close. However, for magazines and newspapers, you can't tell the difference. And printing today is digital anyway, so why add the scanning step? :)
As for cost, digital is just too much fun compared to film. Instant gratifaction, no waiting for the development, excellent platform for training. I own 2 digital cameras, both costed about the same as a good SLR body, my next camera will be Digital SLR, and I expect to spend USD 1500-3000 for the first step.
And digital is cost effective, I have read many stories on dpreview about wedding photographers who have paid for their equipment in few months.
However, I still have my 20 year old OM-2, it is simply a work of art.
J.
Not all photographs get printed out int the way you think.
I am in the business of retail advertising. We take hundreds of digital pictures every week and never make prints from them. They go on the web, in printed weekly advertisements, on posters or shelftalker cards, etc..
The applications for this kind of chip are numerous. The best thing for us will be having a camera of such quality that we can use to shoot on location, and then bring back to the shop and load it into the system for use in our advertisements without having to make slides/prints/whatever. We have that now, but the cameras we use have the pixel-noise issue that we have to deal with. This will save us touch-up work, and therefore time and money.
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.
I don't want blurry, slightly out of focus pictures with distorted colour saturations.
The two primary reasons I've stuck with my trusty Nikon 35mm SLR (rather than switching to a Nikon high-scale digital) are easily addressed by this new sensor technology; namely, no chromatic/edge abberation and increased pixel density over a standard CMOS/CCD.
Now all I need to do is wait until Nikon comes out with a D-series with one of these babies in it...hopefully the guys over there will grow some additional clue and do what Kodak has done with the sensor size; namely, made it the same size as a frame of 35mm film -- meaning that all my glass will function the same on my new digitial as it does on my current SLR.
*sigh* I guess I've got something else expensive on my I-want list...
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
The Foveon is smart, takes pretty photos, The Sigma X3 based camera is nice, but so far it is also not very light sensitive and so many conventional CCDs can easily outperform it in practical use. Besides, it still only measures light in three wavelengths like regular CCDs, so the net results are nearly indistinguishable.
Anyway, back to the Discovery article : The featured sample picture with the butterfly is plain ridiculous : The 'magnified detail' views purports to show how a segment of an image would look like as photographed by different cameras, but as any professional [digital] photographer would tell you, the Nikon Coolpix 2500 sample is as ludicrously fake as the "Nikon F5" picture below. First off, the CP2500 "sample" looks more like a photoshop pixelated version of the image above it. The sample certainly looks nothing like the interpolated pixels digital photographers are used to seeing in close-up due to the nature of Bayer matrix CCDs used in nearly all digital cameras, including the Coolpix 2500.
Since each pixel in such cameras, as the article actually points out, can see either red, green or blue, neighboring pixels in the finished picture cannot be entirely different, because the hue of each pixel is determined from the brightness of the neighboring red, green and blue monochrome CCD pixels. Therefore a magnified image is always a little "soft" and true distinguished color detail are only possible over spans of two or more pixels. In the sample, however, the neighboring pixels shown are clearly completely unrelated, and as such the magnified sample is FAKE.
As for the third sample : For those who might not know, the Nikon F5 is a box like many others, onto which can be attached a lens, any lens of hundreds to choose from, through which light may be projected onto a piece of film. The camera's computer will most competently help the photographer focus the lens and decide proper aperture and exposure settings, but a film camera is just a BOX. One SLR does not take better pictures than the next, if both use the same film stock and correctly focused lens. This means, that it is patently ridiculous to point out that the sample is alleged to come from a F5. If they had aimed for anything resembling credibility, the sample would have been identified in terms of film stock and lens type.
FURTHER, film is not neatly arranged in square PIXELS as the alleged sample shows to contain, sprinkled with yet smaller red noise pixels. This is nothing like what film grain looks like - film under intense magnification shows a clouded and decidedly irregular mass of particles.
FURTHER YET, different film stock have different qualities! A Fujichrome Velvia 50 slidefilm will take longer or more light to expose correctly, but you'll be hard pressed to find more beautiful colors or spectacular detail on a color photograph. A 800 ISO supermarket brand on the other hand, will produce comparatively less remarkable results. So which was the sample shot with?
ALSO, what was used to scan it? How on earth did the scanning program fuck the image up like so? It must have been an insanely low resolution, grainy imager to produce such pixelation. Any garden variety hobbyist negative/slide scanner can scan film so you can nearly see the grain of the film. Here, we just see chunky pixels, with smaller red pixel grain on top : why? Who was the retarded clown operating photoshop?
GRRR.
Lots of people are pointing out that the human eye is not stacked, and therefore the current digicams are 'good enough', or that Foveon is not needed/overrated , etc.
A more apt comparison could be made, instead, with a video camera and the human eye. The video camera is always moving slightly, just like the eye, and therefore there is enough additional information to fill in the missing data.
A digital still camera doesn't give nearly that much information about what's currently between the pixels. Think of it like encoding an MP3, then decoding and re-encoding it. Sounds terrible, right? The digital camera is encoding a scene in a bayer format of pixels. Whether it's decoded/filtered/antialiased, etc afterwards doesn't matter if it is seen by the human eye later - because it is re-encoded into the eye's format, and not only that, but the eye moves around a bit as it's doing so and it doesn't gain any additional information, or if it does it's artificial. Just like listeneing to doubly encoded music is painful after awhile, looking at digital images is painful after awhile.
To overcome this several techniques for post-processing these images are used now, but in the end they all dumb down to the same thing: bluring algorithms - reducing the effective resolution. Do they work? Yes. Are they good enough for professionals doing 20 by 40 foot billboards? Certianly.
But they aren't as good as a system which takes the entire picture at once, with all the additional information the brain will need later to fix limitations in the eye.
If current CCD and CMOS sensors are to make it, they really ought to consider using micromachine piezo actuators to vibrate the image sensor by a little bit, and take several images. This could be used not only to gather all the color information, but to effectively increase the total reolution, depending on the number of images taken. The problems of safely vibrating the silicon while maintaining connections, processing images quickly, and maintaining sturdiness are not trivial, however. Foveon's approach is much more economical in the long run.
-Adam
It's not what you know. It's knowing how to learn what you don't know.
Which is something you know...
Which means that it is about what you know
my head hurts
already exists here.
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.
It is true that professional and consumer digital cameras have come a long way in the last 10 years. My first expereince in digital photography was retouching images from a Kodack DCS200 singleshot camera. Those images really needed some work, but that the time the technology was amazing.
I have worked with many different types of cameras, Shooting, retouching, and reproducing on press, large format printers, and billboards, etc.. I would say that it is a fairly bold statement to claim "most photo editors and labs" think the cameras you named make better pictures.
Most people do not grasp that film has and will continue to have flexibility over digital images for some time. The X3 is great and is a big step forward in terms of accurate color reproduction, but film and scanning will continue to dominate the large format market for some time yet. The ability to focus in on areas of the film, create a significantly increased amount of enlargement, etc. are tools that advertising professionals can't quite live without.
Mind you I think that the time will come where film is outdated on the professional level. On the consumer level...well, that's another story. I think the answer there lies in what percentage of people have access to a computer, and therefore would even bother with a digital camera.
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 ...
Basic PNG can store images with up to 48 bits of depth without a problem, and the basic compression algorithm is what's used in gz - it's deliberately patent-unencumbered.
Also, the statements of some slimy money-grubbers to the contrary, the jpeg compression scheme is patent-unencumbered as well, and the JNG format (one of the PNG family) allows 12 bits per channel per pixel.
See the technical specs on libpng.org for more details.
Try flipping through the bluish-green section of a Pantone swatch book and attempt to scan or photograph some of the pages. Then try and get the colors on the screen to get exactly right. Many colors cannot be represented accurately on a RGB monitor, though the wavelengths of those colors CAN be represented using combinations of LEDs emitting different wavelengths than the phosphors or LCD pigments used on today's monitors.
So much like Pantone introduced their Hexachrome six-color printing system to get more accurate color printing on paper, I should like to see an image processing system with 4 or more wavelengths.
At the very least we should get rid of sRGB (which sucks) and switch to something with a nicer gamut like Adobe RGB.
are only inherantly more useful when you are standing by an electrical socket. Actually, I take even that back.
The reason why I dislike only electronic viewfinders is that you just can't make out the detail you can with the naked eye (i.e. you can't REALLY tell if a picture is going to be sharp or not), and also that they consume battery resources which are ever so precious in a digital camera.
With the Sigma SD-9 in particular (and some other cameras I think), you get an even bigger advantage - a sport viewfinder that shows you some of the area outside the picture, so you can anticipate something entering the frame better than with a viewfinder (visual or electronic) that shows you only what will be in the frame.
I will give you this, the electronic viewfinder is a lot better for many digital cameras because you are seeing everything that's going in the frame - vs. the 98% the viewfinder shows you (which is the case on my Canon S230). But I would not call them inherantly more useful than actually seeing with your own eye, and all the resolution and dynamic range that implies, what is about to be captured.
As for lenses, I think Nikon (or was it Canon?) has announced they are going to be making lensing meant for digital cameras that are indeed smaller and lighter, being designed for the smaller sensor size. I agree that would be really nice to see.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Pretty easy. Take two overlapping sheets of fine fabric, such as present within the veil of a bride, and put them some distance behind each other. Instant Moire.
Professinal photographers have been strugling with this for many years- Digital just has had a way of irritating others to that particular problem.
Interesting- you'd like to see an X3 sample? I'd like to see a camera, first. I just read the reviews in PEI (Photo Electronic Imaging) and Professional Photographer here at work and I see some very distinct colour fringing. Of course, I also saw a 'green' railways car rendered as neutral grey (very appealing) no images of subtance.
I'm actually concerned about your comments about noise. There is a big difference between 'noise' and 'grain' which, to the average photographer, is interchangeable. But when you come right down to it, 'noise' is error and grain is a product of the imaging process
That means you can make a perfectly grainless image that has very low noise.... and I bet you won't like it. No, Really! I know you don't believe it but I've seen statistics that suggest that there needs to be some little bit of 'something' in the system... which translates to grain... for people to accept the image as real. Maybe it will change with time.
I am SO sick of hearing that.
;P) then you'd not have the problem of a purple flower that photographs pink (Rochester, NY, has an Lillac Festival- if you photograph a purple Lillac it comes out Pink if the camera is a cheap digital)
Does anyone understand 'spectral response'? Lets have a 30 second lesson on what 'the eye' sees
The eye can see 3 colours and a 'standard' group of british men are what makes up the CIE Standard Observer. This was arrived by taking 2 monochromatic lights in combination until any projected colour could be created and matched. If you note the Tristimulus graph you can see there are some negative lobes- how can one have negative lobes when you are talking intensities of light added? Because in order to make those particular colours, the 3rd light had to be added to the other side of the screen, in essence 'diluting' the colour to ap point that the colour could be matched.
OK, we've now got an example of what the eye can 'see'- when you have black pants that look brown under tungsten, you are seeing an example of "metamerism". This is when two colours have the same 'colour' but appear different under different lights- I've seen my Red car look purple under street lights, for example.
No camera can beat this except with extremely good colour management- in fact, if it were easy (and it is, just not easy
I could go on and on and on but PLEASE do not call this camera 'like the eye'- all it does is address colour moire issues which on higher end cameras are already being addressed by complicated interprolation algorithms.... which is why you don't see them on your cheap $45 640x480 webcam.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One thing to note though is that 35mm is not all that exists for film, unlike some people seem to believe. 120, 220 (known as roll films), 4x5 (inches!) and larger sizes with matching cameras are around for the pro photographer. Look into Hasselblad to get an idea of the top of the line. As another saying goes, there's nothing wrong with 35mm that 4x5 can't fix. Digital photography is coming to the point where it is better for sports photography with an SLR camera, and for most things 8x10 or something you want quickly. Higher quality images can still be taken with 35mm film, and neither of these formats can can match with roll film right now.
SIG: HUP
Starting with the "butterfly picture", this article is so biased it would even shock Apple's marketing department (and possibly even Microsoft's legal department, although they have an even wilder imagination).
A multi-layered sensor is a great thing as long as they manage to make it with more than one third of the size of competing "traditional" sensors. If you compare a "X3" sensor with 2000x1500 pixels with a traditional "RG/GB" sensor with 4000x3000 pixels, the traditional sensor still gives you better resolution (you can simply scale it down to 2000x1500, getting one sample of each colour per pixel - in fact two green samples, which gives you even better colour fidelity and less noise). And then there's the fact that the Foveon sensor tens to lose colour in areas with high luminance. In other words, you get gray pixels around highlights.
The SD9 is promising, but it's still no real competition for Canon's EOS-D1s or Kodak's DCS Pro 14n.
If you want to read an objective review of the SD9 (with tons of example pictures, and a comparison with other high-end cameras), go to DPReview.
And this has nothing to do with "the way our eyes see". Our eyes don't see at all. It's our brain that sees. If the camera worked like our eyes, it would have a ridiculously high resolution in the centre of the image, and a terrible resolution near the edges (not to mention all the other differences).
RMN
~~~
I've done comparisons between a Phase One 4x5 and Ekta 100 scanned by an Isomet.
Nyquist was right. To get the same detail the film had to be scanned at 2x the res of the Phase One.
As far as Dynamic range, while nothing beats Kodachrome when the subject has movement, digital makes it far easier to do multiple exposures for compositing in Pshop. Also, some high end cameras do give you access to the 48bit raw file.
Bloom County had a great sunday strip where they had a funeral for the "death of film". I think the still photography community is going through exactly the same thing that the motion picture community went thru when portable video came along. umnn, have you seen a S-8 camera being used lately? or even 16mm?
Patrick, as far as 35mm film resolution goes, outputting a 4K image with a Solitare looks far better than a 2K output, so film does resolve more than 1200 dpi. Also, higher end slide scanners have 3 ccd strips, so no color interpolation is needed.
Nikon and Canon also both support their own RAW format encodings. The complete imager readout is saved, no processing is done when in RAW mode. White balance can be adjusted afterwards in Photoshop.
My other first post is car post.
After some inquiries, I got word today that the camera software does run native in OSX (something not easy to find out from product literatuure I've looked through). Still nice to have the free app as well though!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I once estimated that you'd need around 60 MP to equal film. But the signal-to-noise is so low in some digital imaging sensors that you don't such extreme resolution to have comparable image quality. See the Digital Camera Image Quality page.
Also, check out the Canon EOS-1Ds review where this 11 MP camera's image quality comparable to 35 mm film.