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Wavy Lenses Extend Depth of Field in Digital Imaging
genegeek writes "On Feb 25 CDM Optics was awarded a patent for a new digital imaging system utilizing "Wavefront Coding" that produces images with 10-fold the depth of field of conventional lenses. The image itself is blurred until processed. Image examples are here."
So, just take a trip to the next space telescope we put out into space, once every couple of months to get the film from it.
I mean this has it's advantages, perhaps not to the average joe. I like analog photography too, but digital will work much better in getting images from space probes, satellites, and other far off devices, hell, even spy-planes, to another location really quickly.
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
Basically what this is saying is that if I go out and get a new whiz-bang camera with this funky new lens, I will be able to take a picture almost as good as the pictures I take with my 30 year old Cannon AE-1, and not have the leeway of doing photo processing tricks in the darkroom.
You stick to your film. I'll stack my Nikon D1X against your 30-year-old camera any day of the week, personally. And that's not even top of the line anymore -- Canon has a new 11MP camera that puts any 35mm camera to shame.
Just because $300 consumer digicams are crap doesn't mean that digital hasn't already surpassed film. It's just a matter of making it affordable now.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
incorrect.
I've seen the side-by-side comparisons of 35mm film and the cannon 1Ds. As it turns out, 11mp is notably better than film. The 1Ds couldn't quite match a medium format on level of captured detail, but the pics still look a little better due to the lack of grain.
The only real question is whether the 11mp is capturing all the detail available from a 35mm lens.
-Rob
And I'm always leary of adopting a new technology that is monopolized by a single provider.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Does anybody remember the deep focus cinematography of Gregg Toland? How were those shots done?
If you post it, they will read.
if you want to talk megapixels tho there are about 20 million pixels in 35 mm film, there are digital backs for medium format cameras which match and surpass this but for the cost (usually 5k+) it's not in the price range of your average consumer, which probably wouldnt be willing to buy a medium format body either due to cost
There are at least two experienced photographers (Rob Galbraith and Michael Reichmann) who feel that the 11-megapixel Canon EOS-1Ds delivers images with detail exceeding that of 35mm and approaching (in some cases besting) medium format film. They've published some very interesting comparisons:
s p? cid=7-4833-4853
a s/ 1ds/1ds-field.shtml
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.a
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/camer
This may just change someone's opinon on how digital compares to film. I know it made me rethink the "conventional wisdom" that many more pixels are needed to reproduce film detail.
Cheers,
Jeremy
I'm sorry to tell you, but you are just plain wrong. Does your camera exceed the laws of physics? Can your lenses somehow focus a point-like source of light to an abnormally small airy disc? The answer is NO.
Realize that the Canon 1Ds has pixels that are SMALLER than the airy disc size at almost all f/stops. You simply cannot achieve better resolution with the lenses available.
Believe what you want about your 135 film, but it takes APERTURE to shrink the airy disc and improve the true image resolution. As far as 35mm film goes, the 11 megapixel 1Ds can image ANYTHING that comes through the lens.
The same is true for my 6 megapixel D60, but only at smaller aperture f/stops.
havent been able to get to the site because of you lot bringing it down but... is this related to the technology used in NASA's docking cameras? I remember reading that they developed a camera that worked exactly as the /. story described, in order to combat the problem of losing focus on the target spacecraft during docking manoeuvers. The report I read was in New Scientist, probably 3 years ago?
I'd go and find it but NS archives are subscription only. I really ought to get round to subscribing, I buy it often enough...
-Baz
... and I can't find out because the site is /.'ed :-( :-) but some of us nature photographers do.
is this: Can this technology be used to control (not just increase, but also decrease) depth of field at image processing time? More specifically, can I get selective focus *after* creating the image? In criticizing my own work, I ususally wish I had openned up for *less* depth of field. I realize that sports photographers don't have this problem
Actually, that's not true. Film captures color as realistically as the photochemicals can react to the incoming photons.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
If anything, as other people posted, digital is closer to the "real thing".
One person mentioned that Fuji Velvia is great for landscapes but murders skin tones. This is because the sensitivity curve of a digital can be easily optimized, while it's very difficult to tweak the sensitivity and linearity of films based on chemical reactions.
As to rounding to the nearest bit - There's a lower limit in both electronic and film recording of the precision that a light level can be recorded which is distinguishable from noise. This is called the "noise floor" - Use enough bits, and then all the bit roundoffs will be well below the noise floor of even film media. (Which does indeed have a noise floor, just as digitals do. The nice thing about digitals is that with improved electronics and sensors, the noise floor of the sensor is dropping while film is staying the same. One of the things "pro" digitals are known for is having far less noise than lower-end digitals, and those improvements are constantly moving down to the consumer level.)
And for those that WANT the nonlinearities/quirks of film - All a camera manufacturer has to do is model the nonlinearities of major film types and then they can easily be emulated, just like guitar amps that use modeling techniques to emulate older units.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Thanks for the links. It seems this system has am l
downside, namely it introduces its own artefacts,
similar to ghosting. Look at http://www.colorado.edu/isl/intimages/focusinv.ht
and this will become clear. I wonder if this is
inherent in their technique or just the imperfections
of "1.0 release" of their tech.
One could *maybe* do some SERIOUSLY heavy lifting to calculate distance info as one processed the image, but I'd be surprised if it was cost-effective. On the other hand, about a year ago, a video innovation was announced that would allow dynamic, realtime bluescreen, based on distance from the camera. JVC was involved, but I'm not finding the story... This worked by doing pixel-based realtime depth measurements.
If one were to take that additional information and store it, along with the pic, then you could easily do something like you want. In an advanced camera or at the desktop (photoshop or wherever) you'd simply declare: give me everything from 21 to 23 inches away, then run everything else thru a blur filter and put it in a layer behind my primary layer.
My first reaction in thinking about this was the market was too small to likely ever see this happen.
Then I started in on all the places that depth-based selective imagery would be interesting:
cleaning up touristy snapshots (getting rid of the tourbus in front of the Lincoln Memorial by cloning the stairway across the affected area), real estate photos, event/wedding photography, sports photography, ad photography... eliminating unwanted backdrop stuff (like power lines) would become a 'toss everything from 12m to 200m' tool. Heck, after a while, I couldn't think of an image I'd taken lately that I couldn't see some use for something like this.
Most of these are things that a digital photo editor does very well, though, so it may be unnecessary complications to the hardware. That especially goes for selectively blurring parts of your nature photos. I've got friends that do this professionally, and they regularly not only remove unwanted stuff but add stuff that was beyond the camera's field.
Last thought: it'd be cheaper and more expensive to do this depth-via-hardware compared to the video camera technology. Cheaper, because the need to do this 24/30/60 frames a second is gone. More expensive because you're no longer looking at the TV grid of 640x480 pixels, if you're preserving the depth info off a several-megapixel camera. That could make the distance sensor much more expensive.