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When 8 Megapixels Just Isn't Enough
squidfrog writes "AP has an interesting article on a half photochemical, half digital process to produce 2.6-gigabyte photographs at 'more than a thousand times the size and resolution of those generated by a typical digital camera for consumers.' 'A vacuum pump ensures that the film is flat to within one-thousandth of an inch, and a dual-mirror device keeps the film parallel to the lens. Sand bags strapped to the camera and tripod prevent the machine from shifting, and a reinforced aluminum cradle maintains the parts of the camera in perfect alignment.' The images are apparently higher resolution than can be reproduced on available printing technology (5' by 10'), but the designer hopes to use an 18' by 36' digital display wall to reproduce the images at their best possible resolution in the future. The camera has apparently only been utilized for landscape photography thus far."
imagine penthouse printed out in this size format....
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
The camera has apparently only been utilized for landscape photography thus far.
...110lbs of camera, vacumpump, sandbags and a specially reinforced cradle? Me think we won't see this kind of sofistication (and stunning pictures) from a consumerlevel camera anytime soon. Or at all, as he rightly points out in the article.
Maybe as well - a 5'x10', sharply focused photo of my own fingertip wouldn't be all that interesting ;)
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Remember them, just another thing japanese business men will have on their keychain in a few years.
Half analogue, half digital? He's just scanning a large negative, hardly earth shattering.
Everything is sharp? well he's just stopped down the lens. thats why he needs sandbags to weigh the thing down, the exposure times will be quite long i would imagine.
The camera has some intersting features for film flatness but this is really the only innovation.
The neg size is quite puny really. At Antwerpen Photograpic Museum I saw a camera which was HUGE - as tall as me. Took something like 4 foot negative plates.
And I thought normal-sized family portraits were bad enough...
I think it would be kind of limiting to force your focal plane to always be parallel to your film plane. Sure, it works fine for most 35mm SLRs, but when you're working with a view camera like the one the inventor is pictured with, you often find it useful to tilt your plane of focus while keeping your film plane vertical or at some other angle.
Depth of Field is the area of acceptable sharpness, generally considered to be 1/3 in front of the plane of focus, and 2/3s behind it. It's limited based on a number of factors including lens length (and thus, aperture) and distance to subject. If you were shooting a landscape, and wanted to ensure your foreground was in focus, as well as the mountains off in the distance, you'd tilt the top of the focal plane forward a bit, for instance.
Not to belittle this guy's ideas, but going that far out of your way to keep your lens parallel to your film plane, with that type of camera, seems a bit silly.
This sig intentionally left justified.
Genuine Panorama photo equipment was similar in quality.
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A long strip of negative was gradually pulled slowly across the focal plane as the camera was slowly rotated
The photographs from 80 years ago are staggering in detail.
BTW his , method was replicated using CRT and mirrors with a negative moving along in a long strip to create ultra hi rez newspaper printing plates in the early 1980s. This stuff is old hat.
The reason? The negatives themselves are very tall but astonishingly long.
A modern camera can never be desinged to do that. Its a lost artform.
luckily examples of the photos exist in libraries
if dig camera manufacturers did not LIE and count the colors seperately RGBG (two greens per blue and red) then the megapixels would not be 400% inflated.
a 16 megapixel camera is actually only 4 megapixel
a primitive 33mm negative is 8,000 "pels" wid in resolution.
digital cameras will take years to reach that.
even the best real 1920x1080 camera (the Thompson Viper) can take a phot at that res in one 60th of a second exposure at 12 bits of color depth.
Thats a joke compared to a 40 dollar SLR camera.
let alone a 1930s panorama camera
Wake me up in 20 years when i can finally be impressed.
There is noting digital about the camera. It says in the article that the film is scanned after beeing proccessed.
When i Moderate something -1 Flamebait, why do i not get another modpoint?
5--1 = 6
So, the point of paiting is making something that is as close as possible to a photography?
Maybe it's because I saw a Miro exposition just last Sunday, but the quote gave me a good laugh!
The topic is a little misleading I was expecting that the camera somehow used film to store a digital image (makes no sense I know that's why I was interested). But what is really going on is Ross created a really stable, perfectly focused camera and then scanned the negitive in to make color corrections. The camera is not digital at all.
luckily his website doesnt have a 2.6 gigabyte image file...slashdot crowd + 2.6gb file = *shudder*
if anyone has a sample of the mountain picture post a link.
Do you need a website upgrade?
There are professional medium-format cameras with digital sensor. They do more than 20Mpx at $10-15k. I'm waiting for the day when I can afford one of them...
If he had used photographic plates (i.e. glass covered with emulsion) then he could have saved putting a vacum pump on the thing to keep the film flat. I mean its not as if you're going to get that sized film in a roll, is it? :)
2.6GB files would be perfect to use as a wallpaper in Longhorn.
--JC
Finally, a compact camera. Beats lugging around a 235 lb Polaroid for those snapshots you always want to take on vacation.
This sig intentionally left justified.
at that rate you'd need better storage than those 512mb flash cards. even an 80gb slim hd would only store about 30 images.
bite my glorious golden ass.
Because the images produced are so high in quality that scanning it in is the only way you can realistically actually *DO* anything productive with these negatives once you've created them.
There is something similar to this. You can buy digital film backs for medium format cameras that essentially is the film. Although nothing compared to this camera the resolution is much better then 35mm.
The article seems incomplete. What he's describing isn't that unusual except for the size of negative and that's not record setting. Stat cameras have operated with vaccuum assist like he describes form decades. I used to use one in the mid 70s and it was an old machine. I'm sure he had difficulty working with files of that size at first but technology has caught up with him and a workstation board running 8 gigs of ram would handle an image that size quite easily and other than a beefy video card not require any special or custom equipment. It's not a digital image so I'm not sure what he's doing that is so landmark. As the article points out others have worked with much larger negatives. I recall one who even turned a van into a camera for shooting large format landscapes. Most did B&W but it was primarily for artistic reasons. The images sound stunning but there's nothing new as far a technology. He basically updated an old aerial camera then scanned the neg like everyone else.
Dell's model will be a dark gray, "curvy" 6.2-foot film camera that produces what experts say are images "a couple times larger than a 1152x768, but a little blurry". But it will only be 54 pounds because it will be built entirely out of cheap plastic.
You're right. Nothing here is absolutly earth shattering. However, you're overlooking the extent to which the process has been taken. The film flatness is a HUGE issue at the enlargement rations at which he is working. Vacuum systems, while comercially available for medium format, are pretty much unheard of for large format cameras. The mirror alignment check is also a critical detail. Commonly used in telescopes, and within the last few years, enlargers, this is the first camera I have heard of that employs such a thing. Keeping the film plane absolutely perpendicular to the optical axis is, again, critical at these enlargement ratios because even an arcsecond of misalignment will produce visible defocus. The use of aerial film contributes greatly to the finished product. Aerial film has a MUCH higher resolution than standard films. The problem, as stated in the AP article, is using aerial film to reproduce a scene and produce a final print containing reasonable contrast and color values. This is where digital imaging comes in. The negative on the film cannot be used to make a "photo-realistic" print with conventional wet-process materials.
Oh, and it is highly unlikely that he "just stopped down the lens" At smaller aperatures, diffraction starts to become an issue and the resolving power is lowered dramatically. As for the sand bags, their purpose is likely twofold. Well, one purpose, two reasons. Obviously, they're there to reduce movement during the exposure. Part of this need is brought on from the length of the exposure time, but part of it also comes from the maximum allowable movement during the exposure. Take, for instance, the blades of grass. They're x millimeters wide d meters from the camera. From this, you can determine the degrees of arc that a blade of grass subtends. Moving to the back of the lens (inside the camera) you can work from the subtended angle and the distance to the film plane to determine the size of the blade of grass on the film. To avoid triganometry, consider that the entire vista before the camera is shrunk down to the size of the film, a small detail like a blade of grass is really, REALLY small on the film. If the film or lens moves by the size of the blade of grass on film, the blade of grass will be completly obliterated. If it moves even a small fraction of that size, it will be visibly unsharp. There's a reason holography is done on giant, sand filled isolation tables (no, I'm not implying that these photographs are resolved to somthing on the same order as the wavelengths of the light being recorded, I'm just saying thery're out there in the same freaky territory).
This camera isn't a new thing, it's an old thing taken to a place never before explored.
to reconcile photographers about the paper vs digital feud. It sums up exactly what are the advantages of both technologies : film for accuracy and digital treatment afterwards combined to make near perfect prints.
On a smaller scale, I have both an EOS 500N and an EOD 300D, and I use both, but for different reasons. Digital gives me instant verification of my settings and allow me to do lots of tests without burning my money on prints, and my old 500N is used to take the final picture that I will be able to print in large.
To go back to the current topic, it illustrates what direction the digital cameras should take to make film based ones really obsolete: it's all about resolution, although many will say this is false. I agree with the fact that better lenses are far more important than a high resolution, but when you already have a good lens, the only way is to go up in details.
Great, I can see it now...
100 lb sandbags, the next must-have accessories for your 3oz, matchbox sized camera.
The reason the film is held flat under pressure and the front standard is held perfectly parallel to the film is that when you are doing aerial spy photography in WW2, you want to use a large apeture and high shutter speed. This means that your DOF is quite narrow and if the film and/or front standard is out of alignment, some of the photo will be out of focus. Using mirrors would also dampen/eliminate some of the vibration of the planes at the time. Of course, when using the photo for non-aerial/spy photography, you sometimes don't want everything parallel, because you want to change the plane of focus (one of the reasons for lugging such a large camera around in the first place!). So I would have thought this would be a disadvantage rather than an advantage.
Plus the fact you would have to cut your own film for it..
One gigapixel is one gigapixel. Perhaps you meant to ask about the size on disk? The Max Lyons picture (recently exhibited) chomps up 2,068,654,055 bytes of diskspace somewhere. He achieves a LOT with affordable means, and is a also a wonderful photographer. I never tire of that site.
IMAX is such a brilliant form of cinema but it's really restricted due to film costs. The length of the film (Not in minutes but kilometers) is also a problem that drives up cost. (The Human Boday which just came out on IMAX recently is 12 km long)
If we could digitize the process it would allow for widespread IMAZ screen implimentation. However, due to the colossal massive-ness of the screen you need some hiiiiiiigh ass resolution. You would also need some 30 fps out of the camera, so maybe film will be essential to IMAX in the cmoing years, but we can get there!
I'm sure data storage isn't a problem, but resolution and projection are. I'm not calling for implimentation tomorrow, but the digitization of all formats benefits the art, so maybe a 10-year goal?
The major advantage is cutting out the cost for the film (which is high) and the cost of processing the film. (Also high)
Just think of IMAX pr0n!!! Minka can truly be the number one, asian, big-boob queen.
For example, there is Sinar's 22 Megapixels Sinarback 54
Anyway, the problem with digital photographs is not really the definition, but the very narrow luminance range the sensors are able to record. That's where the photo-chemical process makes a huge difference: it is able to keep much more detail in the very bright areas. That wouldn't matter for advertizing photography in a studio with controlled lighting, but in the real world, our eye sees a huge range, photographic film much less, and digital sensors far less.
Where film has it's advantage is resolution.
Also color fidelity and saturation, low-light photography, slow shutter-speed photography (i.e., those cool pictures of a city at night with all the streaky red lights from the vehicles), medium-and-large format photography (though to be fair, Mamiya has digital backs now for their medium-format cameras), infrared film photography, and lower power-consumption.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
As I have mentioned before, for the ultimate in resolution, get a view camera. That's basically what this thing is, though it isn't a "conventional" view camera in the sense that is uses somewhat larger film.
View cameras have been around forever. They are basically a light proof box to hold film, with a lens and a focusing mechanism (about the simplest camera you can have). They are large, but use bigger pieces of film for each photo - It's a simple rule of physics - the less you enlarge, the less detail is lost in the final product.
It hasn't been uncommon for someone to use a 16"x20" view camera for landscapes and to make contact prints (no enlargement) for awesome detail.
So, basically, this "technology," for the most part, is is old news. Yes, there is some new stuff...
What do you lose in using a view camera? Low-quality, plasticy zoom lenses. Cheap, built-in camera meters. Continuous frame advance. Cheesy "auto" modes. The list goes on. So, why use it? Because you lose these things, it slows you down. You think more about composition. You don't snap off 30 photos in 5 minutes and then go home and "correct" them digitally in photoshop. Slower process=better photos (though, clearly, this doesn't apply to the average Joe Schmoe who just wants to take snapshots of his dog and kids).
Digital technology is great, don't get me wrong. But most digital cameras nowadays suffer feature bloat... I can use any of the digicam out there, but when someone is trying to learn the basics of photography, you can't beat a view camera's simplicity.
hmmm
He'd better be careful about the specifications on his display wall, or he'll end up in the same boat as Spinal Tap did.
"Dude, I got an unbelievable deal from this guy who's going to build us an 18' by 36' display wall! This is going to make a great backdrop at our concerts!"
I have done a fair amount of slow shutter stuff with my 300D and I don't see any problems with the results.
I have some photos on my site that I took with a borrowed Nikon D100, a top-of-the-line Digital SLR. You can see the gallery I'm talking about here. Virtually all of the nighttime photos had to be retouched in Photoshop, because they had tiny specks of color in the dark areas. I thought there was something wrong with the camera, or maybe just dust on the lens, but after talking to other digital photographers, I learned that this is a common symptom of long shutter speeds (I'm talking on the order of several seconds here) with digital cameras.
The specs are not visible in the images on my site because (a) I Photoshopped them out, and (b) they were probably too tiny to be seen when the images are scaled down so small. However, in the original, full-size versions of those photos, the specs are clearly visible. They look like stars, but they appear over top of dark areas where stars shouldn't be, like bushes or behind buildings.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.