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Beyond Megapixels
TheTechLounge points to this "first of a three-part series of editorial articles examining current digital photography hardware, as well as the author's views of what is to come." It boils down to the excellent point that pixel count alone is not the way to evaluate digital camera capabilities.
Most people didn't care about resolution in the analog world. The fact that many people considered APS cameras to be better than 35mm is simple proof of this.
This seems analogous to consumer computer makers moving away from advertising GHz and MB.
It's what you (can) do with it that counts.
When you're dealing with digital you quite simply need pixels. You need to decide what size pictures you intend to print or whatnot and get an MP count to match. You can't get a 1.0MP camera and do large prints of any quality.
Of course you also need picture quality. But it really doesn't matter how good the colors are if you're only getting a postage stamp image.
I have a 2.0 megapixel camera which I intend to replace eventually. Not because of the pixel count, but because of the image quality. I have a few pictures where a small branch got just a bit into the frame. The camera focused on that little branch and blurred the rest of the picture. There's no manual focus so all I can do is watch what's in the view carefully.
It also doesn't react intelligently to low light. Although with a bit of modification I can turn that into a feature as I can take time lapse photos to get good pictures in very low light.
As with all things, you need to pick the versions with the features you need.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If we can't use just one metric to identify the quality of a digicam, we'd have to do with something like a (megapixel,sensor size,optical zoom) triplet. Most of us already know to look for more than one feature while buying PC's. It would be nice if somebody well-versed in the mysteries of digital camera technology would standardize the set of features that I should be looking for as a consumer....
...electronics: Cheap ...optics: Expensive
Look at screens. Graphics cards have improved massively (electronics), screens (optics) used to be 1024x768 quite a while back, and typically aren't more than 1600x1200 now. The LCDs will hopefully change that though, since they're much more scalable (make more pixels) than a CRT (move beam faster).
Same with digital camera. The back-end is getting much cheaper, multi-MP CCDs and other electronics, but good optics in the lens is still damn expensive.
I read a piece recently about HDTV cameras. There were rumors that a certain camera would be sub-10.000$. The official comment basicly said "we can't tell you the real price yet, but you're smoking crack. the lens alone is in the 7-9.000$ range".
That being said, most digital cameras today should be just fine, if you don't try to take "impossible" pics. If the sun is saturating the CCD, it won't happen. If there's light casting ugly shadows, fill it in or you'll never get rid of them. There's a lot more bad photography than bad cameras...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
An 8 megapixel ccd behind a cheap lens is going to look worse than a 1 megapixel ccd behind a high quality lens. Look at the pictures of mars, they were taken using a 1mp camera.
Of course, the additional detail is nice. But to be really usable to blow images up (which is probably the only reason for going higher than 4-5mp), the following problems have to be solved.
1. Noise has to be reduced. Especially in dark pics. Less of a problem now, but still an issue. Of course, if you're taking a 8mp camera and printing out an 8x10, you probably won't be complaining. Zoom in to 300-400% and you will be easily able to see it (and all the stuck sensors, but that is another story).
2. The lens is good enough to resolve that detail.
No, your made in china $5 lens will not be good enough. There is a reason professional film cameras have "big ass lenses".
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Even with good lenses and modern low noise sensors, digital cameras has a rather narrow exposure range as compared to classical photography. Shooting with negative film you can get something like twice the exposure range, compared to any ordinary digital camera (i.e. you will be able to see more details in both the dark and light areas of your photo)
First of all, no one has mentioned DYNAMIC RANGE yet. This is the range between absolute black and absolute white. Whether you are using film or digital, this range is crushed compared to the human eye. Digital dynamic range tends to be worse than film, which is one reason film isn't going to go completely away any time soon.
Greater dynamic range will give you better details in your shadows and highlights. This is very important for the serious photog, although probably not important for snaps of your kid's Bar Mitzvah.
The other thing that matters is the actual size of the CCD. Manufacturers are using various technical tricks to squeeze out more pixels from the same size CCD, and the results are sometimes pretty bad. The worst problem I've seen was purple fringing in bright red objects that were backlit. Totally ruined an otherwise beautiful photograph.
The bigger the CCD the better.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Some interesting points there mate. However, don't dismiss software zooming as being useless. The software zoom on most digital cameras take the picture, then software zoom, then convert the raw data into formats such as jpg. If you were to just convert to jpg and use software to zoom, you would be zooming in on the artifacts of the jpeg compression. Therefore, software zooming can give you that little ooomf. I'm ignoring the fact that some cameras don't compress the raw data though. In which case, just ignore me :p
Why not shoot in film and use a film scanner? I've got a 30 year old (Minolta X-700) camera that has been with me through a lot. The thing will not die and just keeps on going. I just have to change the battery once a year or so. I usually develop my photos at a grocery store. Ask to have it developed and cut only - no prints. It costs me 1.25 per roll and I have it in about 20 minutes. Later I scan them in myself, get 11 Megapixel images with 48 bit color, scanned 8 times to minimize noise. (They're about 62 Meg TIFF images) that I can print with up to 13x19 on my Epson 2000P printer. The best part is, in 5 years I'll buy the newest and greatest film scanner and I have the option to re-scan the images at 20 Megapixels or whatever. That's my solution at least. By the way, the scanner was only 500CAD ;-)
Foveon cameras have one three-color sensor per pixel, but for PR purposes, they, too, count R, G, and B as separate pixels. For example, the Sigma SD-10 mentioned in the article has an imager 2268 x 1512 pixels, but is listed as a "10.8 megapixel" camera. For Foveon units, divide by 3.
Foveon cameras, since the R, G, and B sensors are at the same place, don't generate color artifacts at black/white boundaries. This eliminates one of the main effects that makes "digital" look worse than film. Of course, if you compress to JPEG, you get color artifacts anyway, but that's a JPEG problem, not an imager problem.
Agree that ergonomics should be prioritized. It's amazing how many useless "features" the camera makers are adding to jack up their marketing feature list at the expense of usability. There are just WAY too many options. They could get rid of almost all the buttons on a Digital camera for even the pros. I really wish they would simply cut out switches and menu options and make it so that you DON'T need a manual to operate it. My favorite camera is still a fully-manual 35mm Nikon FM2. Either that or an 8x10.
Things I wish manufacturers did:
1. Store data in RAW format. (Thanks to Sigma for pushing this.) This get rid of the useless "low/medium/high quality" switch on the camera. There goes one pointless switch.
2. Store all data at the highest resolution. Get rid of the "small/medium/large" switch. If I needed to store more pictures on my card, I would have bought a higher-capacity CF drive. I can get 4GB models now. That should be enough to store hundreds of pics. Another pointless switch, gone...
3. Get rid of in-camera white-balance setting, and do this on the computer or laptop or even palmtop to simplify the camera and force the complexity outside. (Again, thanks to Sigma) This can be done on the computer if needed with the RAW file. Most amateur users have NO idea what the hell white-balance means anyways. A third pointless switch gone..
4. Get rid of the Priority switches- Aperture, Shutter, Etc.. Instead, allow the user to adjust the Aperture & Shutter on a lens ring. The ring can also have a setting for Auto. This can also be done for focusing with a Focusing ring. There- 3 buttons eliminated just like that.
5. Get rid of on-camera flashes settings (Keep the wimpy on-camera flash if you must, but leave it on Auto always, and auto-disable when external flash is connected) Pro photographers would have an external flash anyways, and any flash settings can be made on that. Another switch, gone...
There's so many useless switches on a modern Digital SLR that can be completely thrown away and still provide all the functionality anyone would want.
Some people may want all these useless features.. for them the camera vendors can have their own special overfeatured model. I would rather have one that's simple and obvious... The first Digital SLR vendor that comes out with a Camera that DOESN'T include an INSTRUCTION MANUAL, I'm buying.
Flower shots from my folks Garden
All of these pictures were taken with my Canon-EOS10D, 420EX flash (used mainly for shadow fill), and Sigma 20mm 1:1.8 EX DG prime lens. The shots were taken hand-held in AP mode using F4.0-F16 depending on the conditions. This particular lens produces ultra sharp results at F4.0-F13 or so. The 10D (and 300D) use a 6 MPix low-noise CMOS sensor and you can see it in the above shots.
Insofar as all the discussion goes, from my point of view it all comes down to three things: Lens Quality, Sensor Quality, and Dynamic Range (of the exposure). SLR's like the 10D have gotten good enough that I don't use film any more. The lens quality is there (being an SLR and taking the same lens as the film EOS's), sensor quality is there, and while dynamic range still needs another 2-4 bits of resolution for my comfort it's still good enough for 99% of the shots I take. Film is dead, digital rendition at 11!
And I tend to agree with the few other obviously experienced comments (verses the bozo comments from people that don't know jack about taking photographs). You first need to know how to take a picture before you can take a good one. Then comes lens and sensor noise. A lens hood is important, and a good flash (articulated for bounce shots and also be sure to have a diffusor handy) is very important (even when you don't think you need it). For example, most of those flower shots I took were with flash+diffusor, even though it was a bright sunny day outside. The flash was used primarily to fill in some of the shadow (one way to correct for limited dynamic range but it also makes the shots look a lot better).
-Matt
Not to get too picky here, but the latest Noritsus and Fuju Frontiers are laser printers. Instead of exposing a selenium drum with an IR laser, they expose the photographic emulsion with red, green, and blue lasers. Some printers (e.g. ZBE Chromiras -- the best in the business) use LEDs, others (crappy ones) use CRTs, but most use lasers.
And not counting the cost of equipment, expect to pay $0.25 per sq. ft. for wet prints. It's going to be a lot more than 5 years before somebody has an inkjet process that can spit out 2000 4x6 archival prints in an hour for less than a nickel a piece.
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