Make Your Own Digital Camera ISO Test Target

dpnow writes I run a digital photography site and came across what I thought might be an interesting story. It's about a Cornell university researcher that has reverse-engineered the design of the ISO 12233 resolution test target, used by all the best digital camera testers. These usually cost over $100 but a free pdf download of the target is available. Print it out on a good quality printer and you have your own ISO-spec test target so you can find out how good (or bad) your camera really is! "

Comments

Tied to the quality of your printer?

[sdo1]

so you can find out how good (or bad) your camera really is!

Or so you can find out how good (or bad) your "good quality" printer is.

-S

Or....

[Halo-]

Or find out how crappy your printer is. Seriously, what do you think is more precise, the electronics in your cheap digital camera or the moving parts and alignment of your cheap printer? Curve dithering is one of the harder aspects of printing, this target seems to rely heavily on them.

This is a fun toy to play with, but I'd trust professional reviews.

Copyright...

[kahei]

Now, there's interesting:

Westin explains that the ISO specifications can be used without restriction for projects like his, though the copying of a commercially reproduced target is, of course, illegal.

(see, I _did_ rtfa!) So, it's illegal to reproduce the image, but creating a new image from an exact description of the image is legal. Yet that _is_ what 'reproducing the image' is!

The reason for this situation is that the image in question is very unusual, in that it has a freely-usable exact description in existance. But what if an exact (text) description of Mickey Mouse were made? You certainly wouldn't be allowed to create new images from it, and yet it's hard to see how Disney would own the rights to that description... hmm...

this helps me a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in a robotics lab working with a CMUcam. This should help us a lot. Those people whining that "real photographers dont use test charts" seem to neglect that some of us are trying to calibrate cameras for sensors and not just pretty pictures.

thanks poster

Re:digital camera reviews are nearly worthless

[ckedge]

I've seen dpreview.com of course. I don't remember anything standing out. But, on your word, I'll go back and check what it's like these days.

[goes away, comes back 15 minutes latter]

Hmmm, ok, I like their "buying guide" that allows you to choose features you want then list all camera's side by side. However - the table is missing a few things (like start-up-time, inter-picture delay, shutter-lag, etc), and the camera I had pointed out is given 4 stars out of 5 despite the massively poor picture quality of this camera, in fact ALL the 10 cameras have 4 stars out of 5 - the star rating is user driven. ONLY 2 of the 10 cameras have in-depth reviews by the dpreview site staff themselves.

They do have a page where they rank cameras by their own review rankings, but it's all mixed together, it'd be a huge pain in the ass to figure out which are the ones I'm interested in and which are on the market, price differences, etc etc. They need to review a larger fraction of the cameras on the market, and add this data to the comparison table.

One thing that is impressive is the last two rows in the comparison table, where they show a resolution chart snapshot and color chart snapshot. The color chart snapshot clearly shows the horrific quality of the camera I was talking about. Unfortunately like the reviews, they are only there for some of the listed cameras.

I give dpreview.com 6 stars out of 10. Steve's digicams gets 4 stars out of 10.

What I want to see is 8-10 stars out of 10 for a rewview site. Isn't this the information age? Where the FUCK ins the information? It's supposed to SAVE me time, not consume my time, and it's supposed to DECREASE the odds of crappy products thriving.
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