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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 ..."
*Sigh* I can see it now... live, high resolution Pr0n. No, seriously... can I see it now???? *grin*
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.
This is not the first digital camera with a full 35 mm size sensor. Canon 1Ds already had that at the previous Photokina two years ago.
To be fair, Canon (for once) took a technological idea from Nikon. The D2H had wireless FTP support back in July 2003.
Also there have been 35mm sensors before, including Canon's own 1Ds.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
The joy of shooting a billboard-sized picture of Britney's latest pimple or a near nip-slip of Jessica and then jog over to a Starbucks and distribute it to the masses all while getting a mocha frap must be heaven. Why did I ever bother with a college degree when so much fun could have been had!
And with its full 35mm CMOS it is the first camera to effectively reproduce the image quality of 35mm film.
:)
The Canon 1Ds (11 megapixel) has a full frame sensor (in other words, does not have the 1.6:1 cropping of the 300D, 10D, and now 20D).
The original Mark II was 8 megapixels and its biggest advantage was its ability to rapid fire shots - like 8 or 9fps, out to 20 frames... something like that.
The 1Ds was the king of image quality. Now it seems like Canon is offering the best of both worlds. If you have 8 or 10 grand or whatever they are pricing it at
I can see a reporter in a repressive country using it to get the stories out before the police take away their camera.
Yes, it was badly worded. As others have mentioned, the original 1Ds was full-frame as well. The big thing about this one is the 16.7 MP resolution, which if I'm not mistaken beats medium format cameras for some applications (i.e. especially for low-light photography, and if you're not making a very large print).
Good comparison between medium format and the old 1Ds here.
Have the JPEG been virus-checked recently?
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.
A few questions: What does noise look like on photographs? What causes noise when you take photographs? Why are digitals better at handling noise?
Depending on whether you're talking about a digital original or a film original, noise looks different from one to the other. On a digital original, noise shows up as "blotchiness" for lack of a better description. Shoot a field of something that's generally the same color (a baseball field at night, for instance) on a digital camera at its highest ISO setting. If the noise is noticeable (which it is on most digital cameras), you'll see random patches where the color doesn't quite match.
Noise in film is different. I'm no photographic expert, but as I understand it film noise is usually caused by the grain itself obscuring some of the detail in the photograph. The shape of the grain is not 100% uniform, and neither is the orientation of the individual grain particles. So you won't get consistent detail throughout an image. I might be wrong on this, but that's my understanding. Regardless, the higher the ISO of the film, the higher the noise level.
Keep in mind that even those photographers who shoot film usually end up needing to get those film negatives scanned so that the photographs can be digitally manipulated. It's a rare photographer these days who can shoot, develop, print and enlarge exclusively with optics and chemicals. The scanning process itself introduces some noise into the photo image, further reducing the quality of the film image, and even the best optics introduce some noise into an image, so people using optical technologies stick to first-generation copies whenever possible.
In a digital camera, the sensor has a fixed amount of light-gathering capability. At higher ISO equivalency settings, the effective sensitivity of the sensor is increased by amplifying whatever signal is detected. The signals are amplified somewhat at all ISO settings on most digital cameras, but the amplification level is higher at higher ISOs. It's this amplification process that introduces noise in a digital camera.
BTW: Digitals aren't automatically better at handling noise than film cameras. It depends on the sensor in the digital and the film used in the film camera.
The larger the sensor is in a digital camera, the more native light-gathering capability it has, and the less amplification is required to get a usable signal from the sensor. This leads to lower noise in the image at any ISO. For instance, Canon's Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) digital SLR has an APS-C-sized sensor (370 sq mm) with 6.3MP, while Sony, Olympus and even Canon sell "prosumer" digital cameras that use sensors that are 2/3" in size (58 sq mm). The 2/3" sensor's got about 1/6th the total area of the 300D's APS-C sensor. Factoring in the difference in resolution, that means that the 300D's APS-sized sensor has a little more than 8 times the area per pixel for gathering light than does a "prosumer" 2/3" 8MP sensor. This adds up to dramatically lower noise for the 300D at any ISO, as I can personally attest. I bought a KonicaMinolta Dimage A2 and returned it because the noise at virtually all ISO settings was objectionable (all my pictures looked blotchy). The Canon 300D has lower noise than the A2 at all settings, and the noisiest the Canon ever gets (1600 ISO) is still lower than the noise levels I saw from the A2 at 400 ISO.
Now, imagine going from an APS-C sized sensor (370 sq mm) to a full-frame 35mm sensor (864 sq mm). That 35mm sensor is about 2.3 times bigger than the APS-C sensor. Even with 2.7 times as many pixels, the 35mm sensor still has enormous light-gathering power per pixel. In addition, I'm betting that Canon's putting its most advanced sensor technology in the 1Ds Mark II, meaning that the sensor is more sensitive than the sensors used in most other cameras, again requiring less amplification and thus generating less noise.
Compared with a comparable Canon 35mm body with the same lens, a picture sho