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."

Comments

Re:My camera

[Ripping Silk]

horses for courses. Glad to hear you camera is all you need.
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... :) (if we had ants that made mounds in NZ!!)

Why Megapixels?

[KlausBreuer]

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.

ICC color profiles

[Speare]

The huge missing-feature for working with RAW images on Linux is not how to read the files, but how to manage color. ICC profiles are a critical part of the process to go from sensor to screen to printer without major swings in color fidelity.

• sensor * sensorprofile = calibrated image
  
  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.