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Beyond Megapixels - Part III
TheTechLounge writes "Beyond Megapixels - Part I & Part II have both been posted here at Slashdot, and now it is my pleasure to bring to you Beyond Megapixels - Part III. This is the final part of this series of editorial articles examining current digital photography hardware. In this segment I will be focusing on function, filetypes, and features."
But the article adressed issues such as white balance, which often is of central importance, even with a 2.1 megapixel camera (unless you are shooting black&white).
horses for courses. Glad to hear you camera is all you need. :) (if we had ants that made mounds in NZ!!)
But you may not be as happy to see that quality picture on a sports illustrated double spread for instance.
People still use film because there is still an issue with the merits of film/CCD/CMOS. Until film is well and truely surpassed by digital, expect to see the megapixels get.. uhhh . mega'rer.
I've recently got into SLR digital with a 10D. Along with that I got some 'L' series lenses, and I would expect my picture quality will steadily improve as the pixels go up. I'm looking forward to it.
What? Do you enjoy being able to clearly see an ant from taking a picture with your camera 12 feet above an ant mound?
Actually..... yes...
this is not a flawless plan.. this is inspiration
Almost all digital cameras have 2 megapixels these days, it's around about the industry standard, nobody needs any more in my opinion. I have a 2 megapixel camera which cost $300, my dad has a 2 megapixel camera which cost $599, theres really no difference mega-pixel wise, of course for more money your going to get a higher resolution and more features, thats off-topic though. I really don't think there's much difference once you get over 2 megapixels though, of course Digital Photographers (professional ones) would complain beacuse it's not a perfect picture when they look through a microscope at 300x though.
Have you metaroderated recently?
as with anything digital, the more data/info you can capture, the more you can do with it afterwards. Ramp up the megapixels, sample rate, clock rate, and so on.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Well, you do need a certain minimum of megapixels, so you can have your photo printed. See, I never print photos on my PC (which is why I don't need an inkjet* with highly expensive ink (1 liter = 1 kg Gold)), but bring or send them to the photoshop instead.
They will print it using a seriously good printer on great paper, and charge a pittance for it. Some shops (and websites) also allow me to design a nice hardcover book full of my photos and text, which makes a great present for friends and family.
But the requirement-limit is at, what, between 3 and 5 megapixels. Using more is useful for cutting images and having only a small part printed, but this happens rather rarely.
Instead I want the following:
* a good optical lens (come on, an f of 2.8 is not that great, unless you live in a really sunny country) with a solid optical zoom (who CARES about digital zoom?).
* Use standard AA rechargable batteries - they are cheap, hold a heck of a charge by now, and are easily replacable - with plain batteries if necessary.
Keep in mind that these things have to be replaced every now and then, and a propriatary one isn't cheap.
* Use CF cards. Cheap, fast, big, and under steady development.
* Allow me to access the camera via USB as an external drive, without needing some kind of stupid program.
* Reasonably small, so I will usually carry it with me in my pocket instead of leaving it at home due to bulk/weight.
Currently, I use the Canon A70/A75/A80. I can recommend them all, except for the lens (2.8, but this currently is standard, except for the great Olympus 5050 with 1.8), and the interface (I have to pop out the CF to read it - I'm not using some kiddy-aimed windows program here).
Not too expensive, either (nope, I have no connection to the manufacturer).
Ciao,
Klaus
* Tip: Buy a used postscripting laserprinter with >= 600 dpi. Dirt cheap, toner lasts forever, you'll love it. And no drivers needed, ever.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I found this series to be a pretty big let down. I guess I was expecting too much, but I was hoping the author would go down the list of where digital doesn't live up to film as a call to action for camera makers and consumers. But no, the series for the most part just talks about existing digital camera features like autofocus and zoom lenses. Oh well.
I want to see some serious discussion about things like color gamut. The gamut of film (especially slide film) is much better than that of digital cameras. Is anyone working to improve the situation for digicams? There's a interesting looking article at extreme tech that talks about gamuts here.
Basically current sRGB devices don't cover the full range of colors which the human visual system can percieve (nor does film, but film comes closer than digital). Think of deep violet for instance. You simply can't get those hues on a monitor, and so today's digital cameras just don't record those colors. However, it is likely that some day we will have monitors and hardcopy ouptut devices that perform as well as the human visual system. So ideally the pictures I take today would have the full range of color information, even if they're forced to display only a subset of those colors on current display devices. That way, in the future when "uberdisplays" are available, my pictures from 2000 will still look nice, and not washed out and cheesy like color photographs from the 60's do today.
If you widen the gamut of CCDs, you'll probably want to add a few bits to each color channel as well -- use 12 bit color instead of 8 bit for instance.
And as long as you're adding bits, the other thing it seems like digital cameras could possibly offer some day is point-and-click high dynamic range (HDR) images, say in EXR format. Couldn't one build CDD sensors with automatic gain control (ISO) on a per-pixel basis, and then assemble the results into a HDR image? Currently the way to make HDR images is by taking several photos of the same scene and carefully merging them together, but that's pretty cumbersome.
With HDR images, you have much more flexibility to adjust the exposure and reveal detail in the shadows after taking the image.
What other cool things could digital cameras offer that would take us beyond simply replacing film cameras?
And then dumping the silver nitrate and the rest of the witches' brew down the sink when you're done? No thanks. I'll keep the rivers around here clean, if its all the same. With digital, you can shoot and shoot, play around with fstop, shutter speed, exposure, everything, without wasting anything except time.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
calibrated image * deviceprofile = output
High-end cameras can attach or apply various sensor profile transforms to the actual sensor data, leaving the pixels in a factory-average sRGB, such as AdobeRGB colorspace. Some can even apply or attach custom tone curves or custom colorspaces if you put the profiles on the memory card.
I haven't used Sane in a while, but it would also need a sensor profile capability.
Since the 2.0 release of GIMP, it has been making small steps leading up to support for attaching color profiles, but not actually applying color profiles.
I've heard that some people on the Xorg team have been considering the full scope of solutions for this problem, but I would rather they just hit the 90% mark with one feature: load an ICC display profile and program a single head on the video card to apply that transform for all X output on that head. Let's not wait for the whole thing (how to profile, how to work multihead, how to manage multiple profiles, etc.) to spring out of the head of Zeus.
CUPS or some other printing subsystem should be able to take ICC printer profiles also, and prefix printer jobs with those profile transforms where appropriate.
Then you'll see a LOT of people in the photography world erase their Windows and their Photoshop, and join the marketplace vote against product activation.
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