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Canon's new 16.7MP Digital SLR, with WiFi
LoudMusic writes "Canon has recently announced the EOS 1Ds Mark II, successor to their previous excellent professional cameras. What makes this one so cool is that it can network. The early review over at dpreview.com says there is an optional part that gives it both 802.11a/g and wired networking capabilities. I can see photographers shooting sporting events with a 12" Powerbook in a backpack receiving images to its 80GB drive and automatically uploading them to SI. And with its full 35mm CMOS it is the first camera to effectively reproduce the image quality of 35mm film. I wonder if it plays mp3s too ..."
I would like to say that only the next thing we need is a motion picture camera to capture full 35mm frames... Then I thought of the next level of using IMAX frames and realized that upgrading will never end.
would be really nice if you could configure it easily on the fly to sniff out open wireless networks and upload your pics as you are taking them.
i could see someone walking around a city taking shots and as they walk around the camera is uploading those shots to a website and resizing and posting them to their photoblog. hot.
I went to the aqaurium in KY right across the river from Cincinnati. They were taking pictures with digital cameras that had wireless cards. They were free roaming... The pictures could be picked up at the end of the day when you were ready to leave.
It was definitly pretty neat.
If all cameras had this (or any sort of net connection, even via GPRS) it would be great to use a script like galleryadd to pump the photos into your Gallery from the road. I do it via procmail, shell scripts, and galleryadd now with my hiptop's camera (although I suppose you could do it with any camera that allows photos with email attachments).
I can see a reporter in a repressive country using it to get the stories out before the police take away their camera.
This has the potential to have a major impact on politics and law enforcement. It combines two pieces, and puts a tool once reserved to the establishment media in the hands of the general population.
Two pieces of background:
Item 1: The microwave-linked minicam (where the picture was on people's screens before the billyclub finished smashing the lens) made a MAJOR change in news reporting. No longer could a corrupt administration use its police or troops to block coverage of an event by siezing or destroying the camera that had recorded it.
(This first hit - big time - during the protests->police riot->general rioting associated with the Democratic Convention of 1968. The live images of the police brutalizing the protesters and reporters couldn't be blocked by camera-smashing. This turned the general population in mass from a "silent majority" going along with the war to a radicalized population appalled by the government's treatment of the anti-war protesters. It had a major effect on the presidential election and the ending of the Vietnam (un)War.)
Item 2: The amateur videocam footage of the Rodney King beating - taken from nearby - created a simlar outrage against the police involved. (And led to laws against photographing "public officials in the performance of their duty" to try to head off further such incidents. B-( ) But personal videocams and still cameras still suffer from the pre-minicam issue: Destroying or confiscating the camera prevents the distribution of the image. So while such photography has some potential to expose official misconduct, it is still limited.
A personal camera with a WiFi link can dump the image up a hotspot and across the net or to a nearby (and not easily discoverable) digital recording device. Now the image can no longer be suppressed.
Imagine a hundred thousand people armed with such cameras, feeding images to, say, The Drudge Report, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Move On dot Org, politics.slashdot.org, and the rest of the political blogosphere.
In the next crisis this could be a significant step in the rise of the net as a news source and its replacement of the establishment media.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I started with the Canon D30 (3 megapixel) DSLR 3 years ago and have upgraded to the D60 (6 megapixel) and the 10D body (also 6 megapixel.) I also shot thousands of frames of slide film previously and scanned them at 21.42 megapixels per picture. I've printed hundreds of prints at home, up to 12"x18" in size.
For 98% of the slashdot crowd, I'll assure you that 6 megapixels is enough.
Ask yourself, what is your goal? For probably half the people, it's a shot that looks decent on your monitor or in email. Well, even 2 megapixels will do that in style.
For the other half of the users, they want to be able to make prints. This is where resolution comes in, the more, the better. With the 3 megapixel cameras, I was able to do nice 8"x10" prints. Anything bigger and it for sure suffered when compared with a print from the 21 megapixel slide scans.
Since 6 megapixels came out, my 8x10 prints don't comparatively suffer next to slide scans printed at the same size. They both look killer.
Now, I like to make prints on Super-A3 sized paper ( at 12" x 18" ) and at that size, I can still easily see the advantage that 21 megapixel slide scans have over the 6 megapixel DSLR shots. But, the big prints are beautiful in either case and I still make them all the time and never feel too cheated resolution wise.
With this 16 megapixel camera, the results would be superb next to the big slide scans. There would be no problem printing at 12"x18" or larger. I would be seriously wanting one of the larger format Epson's that do 20" wide prints or even the 3 and 4 foot wide printers. This camera has the resolution.
So whats your goal? This is kind of a swag but:
computer screen/TV pictures: 2 megapixels
8"x10" prints: 3 megapixels and up
12"x18" prints: 6 megapixels and up
bigger prints: the more pixels the better
Lord, not this crap again.
Your entire argument hinges on lpm measurements. These measurements are, of course, taken on high-contrast black and white targets -- typically 1000:1 contrast ratios.
Now, it is true that when you are taking pictures of closely spaced 1000:1 contrast black and white lines, film still kicks the crap out of digital. But suppose, just suppose, that the average photographer will NEVER IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE take such a picture. The performance in such circumstances might then be pretty meaningless, huh?
The simple fact is that film's resolution is highly contrast dependent. It shows extremely high resolution while dealing with extreme-contrast targets, but performs much worse in real-world conditions. Digital sensor resolution, on the other hand, is largely insensitive to contrast. For real-world scenes and not 1000:1 test targets, a 16MP sensor absolutely annihilates 35mm film in terms of overall image quality.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Wrong. So wrong. Nice imposing numbers and stats, though.
In the real world, on print, where it matters to 99.9% of all users, high-end digital capture equals or exceeds film capture. My images run full-bleed across large-format layouts in W Magazine, Vogue, and you can't see the difference between the shots I used to take on my RZ67 and the ones I now take on my 1Ds. That's all that matters. You will never meet an editor who asks you what kind of line-pair resolution you can provide.
Could I get a theoretically sharper result with large format and film? Who cares? I've got a job to do, and digital does it better than film did. It's only about where the rubber meets the road.