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New Ceramic Lensed Exilim Ex-S100
stuart miles writes "pocket-lint has managed to be the first to review the new ex-s100 3mega pixel from Casio that uses a ceramic lens rather than the standard glass version.
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I don't understand this either:
"The bad:
Only 3.2 megapixels, no SD card in the box"
No SD card in the box is a GOOD thing, who uses wimpy 8-16MB cards that come with the camera? SInce the Casio Exilim line has builtin memory (10-20MB), there is no sense in including small SD card.
Yeah, ceremics can be transperent. It's harder for cermics to be, however, seeing as it's just a bunch of (transparent?) granules smushed together under high heat.
Optical quality (and price) general go as the following:
Cermics
Amorphous Solid (glass)
Single Crystal
The more "regular" the structure (the less interface bounderies and material gradients) the better the optical qualities are.
There is also a review in Steve Digicams. I like their reviews because they also include some sample pictures you can use to compare to other cameras (of course the pictures are taken of the same buildings, etc. but they differe in light available. The sample pictures are still good).
I don't see how they were the first, when Steve's Digicam's has a review for this exact model dated two weeks ago. It's a much better and more thorough review as well, IMHO.
I paid less for my nikon 4mp camera. Sure this is a smaller camera but smaller is not always better. I already feel like I'm going to break my current one and it's huuge next to this one.
There's a much better review at Steves Digicams
Might want to check that one out too.
Do not anger the worm.
The more pixels a digital camera has on its CCD sensor, the larger the pictures you can take. The following is a list of the maximum size an image may be (measured by height x width) for the three most popular types of digital cameras on the market today. * 2-megapixel digital cameras - 1600x1200 * 3-megapixel digital cameras - 2048x1536 * 4-megapixel digital cameras - 2272 x 1704
Linux is like living in a teepee. No Windows, no Gates, Apache in house.
Save yourself some time and jump to the full review, the verdict, or the reader reviews--doesn't look like readers agree with the 9/10 rating.
ceramic==usually more scratchproof
eg: the rado ceramic watchface cannot be scratched with mild steel.
In a nutshell, the transparent ceramic lens can be thinner and lighter than a glass lens because it has a higher refractice index (bends light more). It's also stronger, they say. Nifty, just what you need to make a smaller camera. Of course, if you put that tiny lens in front of lousy electronics, you get a lousy camera. As another post mentioned, the review said there was a lot of noise, which sounds like a lousy camera to me.
See what I've been reading.
dpreview had a press release from Casio a few weeks ago..
... higher refractive index than glass. [snip]... thinner and stronger than conventional glass. ..[snip] reduction in the profile of a lens system by approximately 20%.
Highlights:
August 02, 2004, TOKYO, JAPAN - Using its proprietary optical technology, CASIO COMPUTER CO., LTD. has developed the world's first lens using transparent ceramics. This breakthrough will make it possible to create zoom lenses for cameras with greatly reduced profiles.
There are soom cool pictures of the lenses as well as some text and graphics that explain what is going on pretty well.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Just would like to point out how silly all of this ceramic vs. glass business is, since glass is considered a ceramic! And, "ceramics" encompasses quite a lot of materials. You really have to take announcements like this with a grain of salt, and realize that while it may be better, it is also a gimmick when they say something like new "ceramic" lens! Oh yeah, and I'm a ceramic engineer...
I would think a ceramic would be optically worse due to the fact that the structure would be less regular....
Umm you're calling glass "regular", glass is amorphous, it doesn't get much more irregular. Ceramics have an ordered structure.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The lens is made by MuRata and is called Lumicera. Info can be found at http://www.murata.com/opt/lumicera.html
Comparison of Refractive Index between Transparent Ceramics and Conventional Optical Glass
The refractive index of the transparent ceramics is 2.08 (lambda = 587 nm). It is quite high compared with that of conventional optical glasses (between 1.5 to 1.8). Furthermore, as there is no birefringence in the ceramics, there is a potential for downsizing and advancement of optical devices with optical elements, such as lenses.
There is one thing that most people forget is that there are huge variations in the amount of power stored in rechargable batteries. You need to look on the side to see how many mAh (milli Amp hours) the can store. For the AA size this can vary from 800 to 2300. I had a set of 1200mAh batteries and they would die after 30 shots on my Canon A20 camera. I switched to 2300mAh batteries (that cost much more) and now I can shoot more than 300 shots with the display on, without problems. Expect to pay around 15 EURO for 4 AA 2300mAh batteries.
I suspect the actual achievement here is managing to produce a transparent lens from a high refractive index material, but explain that to the masses who buy low-end digital cameras.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Indeed, that is the key point. From this list you can get an idea of the index of refraction of common materials. This ceramic glass has index of refraction of 2.08.
Presumably this ceramic glass has the advantage of being hard and have a very low cost, otherwise they might as well use cubic zirconia (index of refraction 2.17)
This might be a case of a solution finding a problem.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Oddly enough, Steel with 6.67% bw Carbon is Iron Carbide, a ceramic. According to my material science book, Ceramics are compounds of metallic and nonmetallic elelments. Ionic or Covalent bonds form which are stronger than metallic bonds.
Glass is an amorphous solid, a liquid that is cooled at a rate too high to allow crystals to form. Glass ceramics have a high crystalline component to their microstructure. As a result the hardness of a glass ceramic comes to a higher level.
And yes, I am a Mechanical Engineering student. (Who should be typing a lab report for his material science class right now)
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Typical viewpoint. Everyone else in the world != you.
NiMH AA rechargeables self-discharge much more quickly than Li-Ion, and as you point out they take up more space for the same amount of power. You don't like the camera? Fine, don't buy it. Yay, free market capitalism. But many people are just casual camera users. For them it often makes sense to have a very compact camera that doesn't have batteries that need to be topped off once a week and treated gingerly. Yeah, you can buy some alkalines in a pinch, but that soon gets to be more expensive than just buying another proprietary Li-Ion and recharging it every other month. It's a self-contained solution that for the casual user ends up being a lot simpler to deal with than sets of loose NiMH AAs.
For people like you who use multiple cameras it may make some sense to make sure they all use interchangeable parts, but for most of the rest of us the Li-Ion actually makes some sense, despite the prices. Either way they are immensely cheaper than alkalines in the long run. Have you thought about getting an external Li-Ion powerpack? With those it doesn't matter what type of battery your cameras take as long as you have the proper power connector. Lasts forever too. Check out the DPS-9000 power pack, it screws to the tripod socket so you don't have to mess with a cable running to a belt pack. Great solution if you need to shoot all day.
Check the pics in this review.
No matter that it's ceramic, the lens is still crap...
What will it take before we see a smallish digicam with a decent lens???
3 megapixels is "bad" if you ever want to print your photos larger than 8x10. We've had 5MP cameras since 2001 (Minolta Dimage 7 was the first, I think). There are currently many compact cameras with 4-5MP chips, and a new crop with a 7MP chip although they aren't quite compact. So having a new camera come out with "just" 3.2MP isn't too impressive.
Going up just one step there is a group of prosumer cameras with an 8MP chip that have all been out for several months. 8MP will give you the ability to stretch your photo to 16x20 and still have impressive resolution on the paper, thus rivaling the enlargement ability of your typical 35mm consumer film camera. So from the quality perspective a 3MP camera is still sort of a toy unless you'll never print anything but 4x6 snapshots and a few 8x10s. It's only within the last 18 months or so that consumer and prosumer digital cameras have really started to cross the hump and become as good or better than film for most common purposes. 3MP just doesn't cut it if you want quality anywhere close to film.
Because of their memory effect, NiMH are the most inconvenient batteries to use.
NiMH have very little 'memory effect' - NiCd's are the offenders there. However, all batteries need to be treated correctly - I keep my batteries in sets and don't mix the batteries within those sets, that way I never end up mixing fully charged batteries with semi-charged, etc (which really does kill batteries).
NiMH cell capacities are now on-par with Alkalines, the only downside of NiMH cells is that they do discharge over time.
Whilest Li-ion's have a higher energy density, they are also not compatable with alkaline batteries, and when I'm on holiday and stuck with a dead battery I'd prefer to have the option to buy some alkalines from the shop rather than do without my camera.
(I have a HP Photosmart 850 and am _very_ happy with it)
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That explains why museums are full of puddles where the roman vases used to be.
You're spreading a myth.
Clear, Dark Skies
As the other ceramic engineer pointed out, glass is considered a ceramic. What makes it good for lenses is the fact that it is amorphous, i.e. has no periodic crystal structure. Thus, light will pass through it without being refracted in strange ways because on a macroscopic level, all the glass is the "same" (or the heterogeneity is small enough and distributed evenly and randomly).
Now, I didn't read the article, though I wouldn't expect it to get into details. I assume by "ceramic" they mean "crystalline ceramic" (versus amorphous). When you make crystalline ceramics, you don't typically make one continuous crystal (like a polished gemstone), but many small (10 to 500 micron is typical) crystals (grains) surrounded by very thin amorphous regions (grain boundaries). Grain boundaries serve to refract the light (I suppose they are much larger and thus less heterogenous than anomalies in the amorphous glass), which is why ceramics (think dinner plate) are opaque. I'm getting to the limits of my [limited] knowledge, but I believe the only real way to make transparent crystalline ceramics is to use a single crystal which contains no grain boundaries. This tends to be costly due to the need to melt the material to coax it into a single crystal and the high melting temperatures of ceramics (see silicon industry).
Given that, I'm not sure why using a single crystal lens would have an advantage over an amorphous glass lens... Perhaps you can achieve a higher index of refraction.
Furthermore, as there is no birefringence in the ceramics, there is a potential for downsizing and advancement of optical devices with optical elements, such as lenses.
I didn't know what birefringence was, so I looked it up: it's the phenomenon in certain crystals that causes them to have two indices of refraction, so light beams entering are split into two parts.
It's not a problem in glass lenses, but would be if you made a lens out of those crystalline materials.
There's another way to make polycrystalline (as opposed to single crystals) ceramics transparent: Make the grains smaller than the wavelength of light you're trying to transmit, eliminate porosity completely, and eliminate the sintering aids that go to the grain boundaries and fudge up the refractive index there.
Transparent polycrystalline alumina (not aluminum) has been in regular use for 40+ years. It's called Lucalox by GE and is the refractory material that makes up the tube used to hold the molten sodium in all those yellow/orange sodium streetlamps.
I'm assuming this is what the camera lens is made of, but have nothing to back that up with.
As a side note, you may have noticed that every few years someone publishes a paper on a new way to make transparent polycrystalline alumina, then the non-materials-science media (*cough slashdot*) catches wind and assumes alumina is the same thing as aluminum, and suddenly the prophecy of transparent aluminum from Star Trek IV has come true. It's sort of a running joke in the materials science community.
If you need maximum battery power for your professional work, you need a professional camera, and multiple batteries. A pro wouldn't use a Fisher-Price Kodak 110 camera, either, unless maybe they were doing something experimental. If you don't want the batteries to self-drain, leave it connected to the charging system at all times. Easy peasy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We are told that the ceramic material has an index of refraction of 2.08 and is more durable than other glasses.
Being highly myopic, I am interested in ophthalmic applications of new materials. Right now, I am wearing a Nikon 1.74 index plastic lens, which is quite thin for its power.
The highest-index material that I am aware of currently being marketed for eyeglass use is the Zeiss Lantal 1.9 index glass. However, this material is quite shatter-prone, having only 1mm center thickness. I am told that one can poke a finger through a Lantal lens.
In addition to refractive power, for eyeglass use one must consider other optical properties, in particular the Abbe value. The Abbe value characterizes the chromatic aberration of a lens. The lower the Abbe number, the worse color fringing will be; some eyeglass wearers cannot tolerate high-index lenses because they typically have lower Abbe values than plain plastic.
Interestingly, Abbe is potentially irrevelant in a digital camera, because any chromatic aberration can be digitally removed. Effectively, you treat the R/G/B images from the sensor as three independent images and size them individually to compensate for the aberration. This cannot easily be done with a film camera, and is not possible at all with eyeglasses.