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The Future of Digital Camera Technology
An anonymous reader writes "CNet News has an interesting look at where digital camera technology is headed now that the megapixel buzzword can be put to rest. From the article: 'In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,' says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon's camera marketing group. 'Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate. We can easily go up to a 13-by-19 print and see very, very clear detail.'"
1. Buy 1 zillion megapixel camera
2. Take photos of bugs
3. Show EVERYBODY ze clarity
4. Reap the substantial social benefits!!
I thought lens and zoom was where progress was truly at.
Now that we have cameras of a decent MP maybe we could stop saving as jpeg and instead use a lossless format? That combined with a decent optical zoom and something like a 13MP camera would be good. That leaves us with the primary worry of storage. I'd suggest making cameras able to wirelessly connect to another portable device you could carry in a pocket of purse that acts like a hard disk and could store 100GB of files or more. That and improved batteries would be great.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Why all the big attachment to JPEGs?
Isn't it better to be taking lossless pictures with digital cameras anyway?
(My digital camera only writes in jpg format. I'm not sure if this is rare amongst digital cameras nowdays, but it doesn't seem ideal.)
So what, technology should just stop because consumers don't need anything better? Technically most people don't need more than 1ghz of processing power, but thankfully that hasn't stalled the IT industry. Personally I think we should continue on until we hit a technological wall, or at least until the consumer models would be way too pricy. I see no reason I shouldn't have a 100 megapixel camera if someone can deliver me one for a few hundred dollars.
...for all but the most discriminating consumers. The only difference with 8MP cameras is that now people are posting 4MB images on their Web pages, or emailing them to Grandma who's still stuck on dialup.
Better quality CCD sensors with very low "noise" even at high ISO settings (ISO 1000-1600). This will likely require either larger size sensors or improved semiconductor design for the CCD sensor itself.
Amended quote: 8 megapixels of resolution should be enough for anybody.
I personally carry my phone around far more than I do my camera, and consequently I find myself taking photos where I'd normally be wishing I had my camera with me. Integration can be disastrous if the usability of any of the devices is affected, but if done properly, it can be excellent. Bring on the iPod Camcorder Phone!
"In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over," says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon's camera marketing group. "Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate."
Anyone care to guess how long it will be before this quote supplants "640K should be enough for anybody" as the Worst Technology Prediction Ever?
Try posting more than a few of those suckers on Flickr and you're SOL on your space allotment.
There are two other things that can make or break a camera
What seems to slip by the average digital camera buyer, is that megapixels are only relevant in relation to the size of the CCD/CMOS.
SIZE does matter.
BIGGER is BETTER.
Here's a great website that does a basic talk about sensor sizes
If you follow the links you'll learn a lot more about why the sensor & pixel size are possibly more important than just the megapixels offered.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
7 or 8 megapixel may be adequate for consumer cameras but even the highest pixel count availible doesn't match the needs of a lot of professionals. They've finally hit pro level but for high res work many still need to use film. The mass market race is over but pro cameras will keep increasing for years to come. A 4'x5' still has far more resolution than the best camera on the market today.
Image Stabilisation. Low-light performance improvement. Battery Life.
There's a lot of people out there who have no concept of the Golden Mean or Rule of Thirds. If I get ahold of one of their pictures and have to edit it, I like being able to crop and have the extra resolution to zoom in. For those people, 16MP isn' even enough.
Your post is so misleading that I don't know where to start.
A camera that takes photos in RAW format use significantly more space than taking the same picture in JPEG. However, the RAW picture of the same scene does not have the loss of detail or the inevitable artification of JPEG.
Lets debunk your comment with a related example: Is a 1MB photo taken at JPEG on 20% quality going to be better than a 1MB photo taken at 80% quality? The photo taken at 20% may have "more picture" but it is grainy, filled with artifacts, and disgusting looking. More quality, you say? You're an idiot.
RAW is not a dumb choice, its just not a choice most people need to be concerned about. RAW is for people who want to take the highest quality of digital shots.
I bought my parents a $200 5.3 megapixels camera (Fuji), thinking it would have the image quality of my year-or-two-old 5.0 megapixel Nikon Coolpix 5700 ($800 at the time). Well, it didn't come close. It was horrible at moderate light conditions (indoors, all lights on, with flash), and not much better in full sunlight outside. Had to return it (after restocking fee at Besy Buy), and still haven't picked out another one for the parents. Almost makes me feel good about my Nikon, but I really wish manufacturers wouldn't inflate the pixel count on shitty cameras to lure unsuspecting consumers into thinking they are good quality. At least I won't fall for it next time, I'll defininitely read reviews and look at pics taken with cameras on a PC before buying again.
As a professional graphic designer and artist, I feel that we'll still need a bit more in order to say "we've got enough pixels." For instance, I do a lot of texture photography - shots of various objects, capturing as much of a surface as I can. I want my stock textures to be as high-res as possible, because there are times where I need to isolate very small areas and blow them up to an extreme. Same goes for regular stock photography; I need to be able to isolate and blow up certain parts to an extreme, and I can't always set up a nice macro shot (with a random occuring event, such as a drop of water).
In short? No, 8mp isn't enough for me.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I read about this 3-4 years ago in Discover Magazine.
X3 is a CCD technology by Foveon Inc. that captures all three colours instead of one per pixel as traditional CCDs do.
What this means (in my mind) is that traditional CCDs throw away two thirds of the image data and the software makes up that missing data. I.E. Take three pixels; one captured the red, the next blue, and the third green. The SW looks at the blue and green to determine how much of those colours should be in the red pixel and likewise for the blue pixel and the green pixel. So yeah, while the pics made with digital cameras look good they're only one third real.
But the X3 CCD by being able to image all three colours (red, green, blue) in each pixel creates a sharper image and one truer to the original scene.
Wikipedia knows about X3
Sigma Corp. makes two camera with X3 CCDs. When I finally go digital in photography I'm getting one of these.
The SD9 and the SD10
I have a suggestion: VIDEO.
However many megapixels, but I can still only capture 640x480 video. theres no reason this couldn't be full PAL/NTSC or even HD - add a weight to it and you have a extremely good quality video camera for very cheap.
Let me edit the camera OS and I'll implement it myself, including time lapse or variable frame rate. I'll connect it to my laptop so i don't run out of space.
They keep wanting to milk us for every new "HD" format video camera.
The other thing they can implement is HDR photography. I know RAW is good, but if they can master true HDR that would be awesome.
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
How about better form factors? Casio S500 is 0.65 inches thikc. Thats tiny, tiny in the way that counts, fits great in your pocket, no bulge. Dad's got a really tiny minolta, but its still too thick to be really comfortable in pocket. Sony's got a nice touchscreen (with a hideous ugly bevel around it). Drop in a massively telescoping lense, a bigger higher sensitivity lower noise CCD... oh fantastic. Reduce shutter lag to nothing, add in better shot bracketing and rapid firing. Others?
The other big advancement would be when someone thermally insulates the CCD and adds in a thermocoupler. Cool down that CCD and drop the noise, yesh, yesh! That'd be damned good sensitivity. Figuring out how to work the power consumption would be tough.
On the other hand, the escallating megapixel war does partially negate the need for better optical zoom. I figure a 18 megapixel sensor is to my old 2 megapixel Olympus C-720 as a 15x optical would be to a 3x optical; the same dpi, same resolution.
'In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,' And 640K should be enough for everyone! I wouldn't mind the ability to zoom in on pictures. I expect the future photo albums to be digital anyway (be it digital paper or something similar). What if you could zoom in on a bird in the background, or even the reflection on someone's glasses? What if you could take holiday shots of a mountain or bridge, and then zoom in later to count animals and people. Also, as other people have mentioned, having lossless picture formats would be 3
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
I realize the article is aimed mostly at consumer compact cameras rather than SLRs, but this is a big discussion among SLR users, a rapidly growing part of the market as prices continue to drop.
Canon appears more dedicated to the full frame format. The new 5D and the lack of true "pro" lenses in the EF-S format seem to demonstrate this.
Nikon looks more dedicated to its DX format, especially given its new D200 and selection of "pro" lenses (its 17-55mm f2.8, for example).
Both companies and some third-parties have released wide angle lenses for their smaller sensor formats that are, by most accounts, good performers. With these lenses, I'm pretty satisfied as far as wide angle coverage goes (although they may be insufficient for many users, I realize), and I appreciate the "crop-factor" on telephoto lenses which uses the generally better center part of the lens and gives more "reach" while letting me use smaller lenses.
I'm between SLRs at the moment (was a Canon user), but think I'll go Nikon once the time comes to buy my next camera due to this full-frame issue - the DX format better suits my needs as someone who uses telephoto more often than wide angle. What are other users thinking?
I really wish Canon had put IS into it's S80. That's the key feature missing from it that the PowerShot S2 IS has. I can live without the massive 12x optical zoom because I want a compact size, which is what the S80 has instead. The S80 is the first Canon to add the iPod-like jog dial with four buttons underneath, making manual control a whole lot easier in the same amount of space.
Can compare to about 17 megapixels in digital photography, but I'm guessing that the human eye can't destinguish the difference at lesser quality then that. I think it would be nice if all digital cameras outputted RAW format or a lossless codec like png. I don't really understand the obsession with jpeg either. I guess that's just what people are used to, so it's the norm.
A little less than a year ago, a graduate student at Stanford gave a talk on light field photography at the University of Washington. The results were extremely impressive. Basically, by inserting an array of microlenses in front of the CCD, you can determine the direction of every ray coming into the camera. You lose resolution, but who needs 8 megapixels anyway? What you DO get is the ability to refocus the image in software, and take photos in low light and still retain a high depth of field.
I highly encourage you to check out his light field photography site, including his galleries, tech reports, and papers. It'll blow you away.
I was looking at an ad in the New York Times just last week. It was a full-page photo for a major telecom and all I saw was pixels. It was something and art director would never have stood for even a couple of years ago but will accept today in exchange for the digital workflow and instant gratification. I'm not sure a lot of people who state how much resolution is enough have ever seen a good print made from a piece of large format film. But then again this isn't so different from what large format photographers were saying when 35mm came on the scene and it turns out the world was big enough for both.
Heck, I'd like to put a 4'x12' panorama over my fireplace...
how about they put a 16 megapixel ccd and use hardware to average squares of 2x2 pixels making the images more accurate and less prone to noise.
DankLogic - There is a system to everything.
My relatively old camera has exposure bracketing, which has proved useful a few times for me. But focus bracketing would save MANY more of my photos. I'm imagining that the camera would take a photo at whatever the current focus system does, then focus out a bit, and focus in a bit (Ok, I don't know the terminology). It's far too often that my particular camera doesn't quite focus right. Either I aim it wrong, or the lighting throws it off, or maybe in hindsight, I just wish that I had focused on something else. Plus, editing the photos later would be much more interesting.
Who the fuck modded this +5?
What he's asking for already exists. You can use RAW mode or some cameras will even save as TIFFs if you don't want jpegs. Same for wireless - that stuff is already available (although not mainstream -- yet). Current batteries aren't bad either (heck, I can fill a 2GB card on a single battery). Also, for pros who do a lot of shooting, there has been specialized battery packs for years [for the camera AND flashes] and such solutions...
There are plenty of things that suck with cameras nowadays, and these things aren't it.
The interface/menus on most cameras suck (especially P&S cameras - those menus are like a fucking maze, and what about the impossible to remember button combinations for anything non-trivial?)
Dynamic Range. I don't want more megapixels, and current noise levels are about as good as they'll ever get (compromises). But I *WANT* more dynamic range already - even better, a film-like "shoulder" in the response curve (in the highlights) - without having to combine pictures. It's annoying to have to combine shots all the time (even if one uses ND grads). This is perhaps the biggest issue with regards to digital photography right now.
What about that four thirds "universal" system they used to talk so much about? I don't want to sell all my Nikon glass (several thousand $'s worth) to be able to use a Canon camera, or what if I wanted to use a Canon lens on my Nikon? This was supposed to let you do it by swapping a mount/adapter. Absolute freedom! No more system lock-in!
The lighting system on most cameras is quickly becoming a mess. Forget about tried and working "real" TTL (matrix, color matrix or whatever). Now you need special oddball not-quite-TTL (dTTL/eTTL/iTTL) flashes for every new camera they put out... It's getting more complicated as you try to use things like plain TTL strobes and such... CCDs made this harder, and they try to make you believe it's better now, but it isn't.
There are tons of things that could really improve...
There are many things which have improved a lot on recent cameras: things like startup times and shutter lag, orientation sensors are pretty much standard, etc.
People worry too much about megapixels. You also need the [expensive] glass with sufficient resolving power to make use of it. And for 99% of the population, it's already overkill. How many megapixels one needs to make bullseye snapshots of their dogs? Give 'em a million megapixels and their photos will still suck. And resolution isn't "linear". To have a picture twice the size in each direction, you need 4x the resolution i.e. the difference between a 5 and a 6MP camera is nearly non-existant. If you need more megapixels than the current cameras, most likely you'll need to switch to a medium format camrea with a digital back (mainly because even the most expensive 35mm lenses only have so much resolving power), which will cost tens of thousands.
The other comments in this thread seem to only talk about the file size issue of the picture you snap. But there are actually three other factors you need to keep in mind. And since the parent mentioned that he would be OK with a 100 MB image, these factors would become readily apparent:
1. Battery life. If you snap pictures with lossless formatting, and thus increase the storage space used per picture, your battery life will plummet. Simply because the camera will be expending much more energy, either transmitting the picture via the wireless link or writing to an internal flash card.
2. Rapid pictures. The larger your images are, the longer it will take to save them. The internals of the camera can only buffer so much data. If you are saving large files, the cameras will take a long time to save them, so you will get much more of a delay between pictures.
3. Save speed. The larger the files, the longer it will take to save them to internal flash or via a wireless link.
3a. Good flash cards will transfer data at up to 20 MB/sec (http://www.kingston.com/digitalmedia/x/). Average cards will do up to 8 MB/sec, if that. So a 100 MB file will take 5 seconds to save on the best flash media.
3b. At full 11 Mb/sec (1.375 MB/sec), a 100 MB file would take 72.727 seconds to save. At full 54 Mb/sec (6.75 MB/sec), it would take 14.814 seconds to save. At full 108 Mb/sec (13.5 MB/sec), it would take 7.407 seconds to save. Those numbers are using the full bandwidth for data transfer, so double those times for real-world scenarios with not-perfect signal quality and wireless overhead.
In other words, the biggest obstacle I can foresee is the time to get the picture from the lens to the disk. After that is the battery life.
First and foremost, the camera must be small and light enough that I can always carry it with me - and yet have a useful optical zoom. ... in fact they don't have flash!) :-)
Concord seem to have that problem solved.
More than the 3 MPxl resolution would be nice, but is not the top priority for me.
Reducing the latency to near-zero is my next request - cheap camera-phones almost manage it; why not "proper" compact cameras.
Good low-light performance, and a flash that can be set to a default of "off" would also be good.
(Again, those camera phones seem to do pretty well in this
Now you've solved these I'll happily push up to 6-8 Mpxl if this does not lose the low-latency low-light performance.
I might even pay £100 for such
Andy
I am surprised they didn't talk about speed. Latency and shot to shot. Every consumer level dicital camera I have tried so far was incredibly slow compared to a cheap film camera. I would buy new camera every two years if it was significantly faster.
AccountKiller
I've seen a lot of noise about using small CCD's and how you can get a multi-megapixel image from a CCD the size of the head of a pin! NOOOOO! You can get a multi-megapixel image, but the results are not as good as a CCD which is 35x24 mm (the size of a traditional 35mm camera film frame). So what is my point? More light can get through a big lens and strike a big CCD than can pass through the head of a pin. I don't really care if the big CCD has more than 8 megapixels, but it is important that more photons of light can hit it. Reduction lenses add more glass (that attenuates light). I know that 35mm CCD's can go up past 12 megapixels (which is more than most people need), but I would rather reduce the image size as needed, rather than not have the lit image to begin with. I like a bright clear crisp image (if that's the kind of shot you are going for). Cranking up the response of the CCD doesn't replace more photons hitting it. It just doesn't.
I recently switched from prosumer digital cameras to a DSLR. For the most part I'm happy with my DSLR and I like that I can purchase a wide range of lenses for different situations. However, there are a few things I wish DSLRs could do that they can't or don't.
I really miss the option of being able to frame the shot through the LCD which I could do on much cheaper consumer/prosumer cameras. I've read some discussions on why it isn't/can't be done on DSLRs but I still would like the option.
I also miss the option to record video and audio clips on my DSLR.
For the most part I like my DSLR but I've considered getting a backup consumer/prosumer model just for convenience.
Dont digital cameras still suck really bad at taking night pictures? Is that improving? And dont they also have poor color accuracy or has that improved?
I still use the one megapixel HP PhotoSmart C200 I bought back in 1999.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The only company putting optical IS on its compact and sub-compact point and shoot cameras was Konica Minolta, but they pulled out of the camera and photography business entirely a few weeks ago.
There's no point in this article that hasn't been discussed in a miriad of other forums.
Please mod it down.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Most cameras have a "raw" format, people just don't use it because they are n00b.
...the next step is to embed an iddy biddy little cell phone into all cameras. Not a decent phone, just a crappy little one that you'll never actually use. Then market the hell out of it, so that all manufacturers jump in. Pretty soon, it won't be possible to buy a camera without also paying for a crappy cell phone too. Call it "Progress".
I'm glad that my digital photos don't all take up 19TB apiece -- but I am puzzled by the idea that I should be complacent with a given MP number as "good enough." I want shots that are infinitely detailed, and (at least in the area of interest) infinitely sharp. Since neither of these is an available option, I've got to settle for for "sharp enough that I can stand it" and "as detailed as the lens and sensor let me get."
...
;)
Doesn't everyone at some point end up cropping their digital photos, and hitting the jaggies? The main reason I'd like more (and more and more) resolution is because I don't *know* how big I want that photo to be shown in the future, and I don't know if cousin Vinny has a hilarious expression on his face that will be lost in the haze at 5MP but might be a treasure at 10MP
The idea that 8 or 10 MP is "enough" and that now everyone can just go home and be happy isn't completely groundless (we've certainly reached a point where "more pixels" isn't the main thing being sought by camera buyers), but it's only true while other things (sensor designs, storage capacity, cheap-yet-bright-and-not-too-heavy lenses) catch up and remind us that data uncaptured is data that can't be restored.
I'm sort of hoping that mid-range DSLRs hit 12MP in the next 2 years, and that Pentax still makes one that runs on AA batteries
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
They tell you the camera has 8MP, but "forget" to mention that in reality it has 4M green pixels and 2M of each red and blue. And there's a blurring filter in front of the sensor to reduce moire. So if you photograph fall foliage, your 8MP camera turns into a 2MP one at best. In the BEST case, it's a 4MP camera really, not 8MP.
The only sensor that takes full RGB readings at each sensor location is Foveon, but it suffers from inferior color reproduction and lower ISO sensitivity. It's also pretty low on "real" pixel count - currently at around 3.5MP (which in Canon/Nikon terminology would be called 10MP, because each pixel takes full RGB readout). Foveon pictures are extremely sharp, though, and render textures very well. If they solved their color reproduction issues and upped the pixel count to "real" 5MP - I'd RUN to the store with my credit card in hand to buy a camera based on this sensor.
I thought we were pushing the theoretical limit for that - there are only so many photons impacting the sensor surface, and it's not possible to catch many more with much more accuracy than we already are.
Actually, even if you had a theoretically "perfect" CCD or CMOS, you can catch about two-to-four times as many photons.
The problem lies in the way the photosites capture light. Most designs are variants of the every other location is green with red and blue alternating the others. Something like:
RG
GB
Green gets twice the representation as human eyes are more sensitive to green and thus more detail in that part of the spectrum is considered desirable.
A recent trick to squeeze out more is to turn the photosites at 45 degrees to the grid you actually capture. You're then forced to interpolate more but the theory is that you get a smoother response.
Regardless though, any given location can catch red OR green OR blue parts of the spectrum. If green falls, 50% of it is lost. If red falls, 75% is lost - same with blue. You're always throwing away half to three quarters of your photons simply by having photosites dedicated to individual colors.
With Foveon they try tackling things differently. By exploiting the fact that different wavelengths can penetrate silicon to different depths, they figured you can have a three layer deep photosite that captures red AND green AND blue - none of this ignoring chunks of the spectrum and throwing away data.
Of course, for all it's a cool idea, it's proprietary, has only made it in to a few cameras and doesn't seem to be hitting its full potential yet. My guess is there's still quite a bit left that can be squeezed out of CMOS (Canon's 10D got noisy at-or-just-after 400 ISO wherease the 20D, 18 months later, could handle 800) and we'll see them follow that technology for a while whilst waiting for Foveon to move out of patent protection.
Still, in the future, I'd imagine we'll see Foveon or something different but exploiting some similar concepts replace individual colored photosites. Until that point, no matter how good things get, there's always a full stop of light's worth of extra quality sitting and waiting.
We need more trees to produce photo paper. A direct result of future DC.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
"Canon's S2 IS can even film and snap stills simultaneously, thanks to separate shutter and start-stop buttons."
Can even what?
Olympus E-system cameras have this feature.
>>> ...
Doesn't everyone at some point end up cropping their digital photos, and hitting the jaggies? The main reason I'd like more (and more and more) resolution is because I don't *know* how big I want that photo to be shown in the future, and I don't know if cousin Vinny has a hilarious expression on his face that will be lost in the haze at 5MP but might be a treasure at 10MP
>>>
I think most manufacturers as well as consumers agree that an add-on telephoto lens is a more economical and sensible solution to this problem than overloading on resolution.
If only Nikon could get me the D200 I ordered Dec 8...
"My fellow Americans, these are not the droids the nation is looking for."
If you could only carry around program with you all day, it would be much better to have a program that did everything. Similarly, if you can only carry around one or two devices all day, it's much better to do everything.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can't being to count the number of large resolution photos with crappy image quality. Sure the photo you took was 3500x1500. Too bad it was blurry, out of focus, framed wrong, full of noise, had the wrong aperture. And the worse thing about it is that then people send around these pieces of crap around filling up your 10GB gmail account thinking they're great photos because they were taken at 8MP.
The camera should have built-in software that detects the level of image quality crappiness and auto-resizes photos down so the resizing hides all the flaws. Those people who pass tests on photo taking, photo retouching and freaking internet etiquette are given a special code to suppress this function.
It dosn't matter how smooth the lense is, if it's too small you'll never be able to take a picture indoors.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's been corrected here, and elsewhere, 10 billion times, but no, we're all too fscking lazy or stupid to get it right.
640k was a hardware design decision, by IBM. The processor could only address 1M of RAM anyhow.
It's true, though. You lazy dumbasses who can't get history right ARE doomed to repeat it.
Pretty much all of the panasonic cameras have optical image stabilization. check it out. Canon actualy kind of sucks. My SD450 blows compared to my old sony DSC-V1. Yeah, the lense is smaller, but it's also lacking basic options like a manual (stepwise) focus, and a manual shutter setting for less then one second.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Though I used to work in DSP (digital signal processing) I don't want any of it in my camera, still nor motion. Give me a high resolution, decent optics and preferably a RAW output format. I'll do the buying of memory cards and a tripod for my shaky hands. But NO digital mumbo-jumbo for me.
now that the megapixel buzzword can be put to rest. From the article: 'In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,' says Chuck Westfall,
... the gigapixel wars has
Begun
There is a difference. A 8MP camera is equivalent to a 4MB camera plus a x2 zoom.
In the old good times you could zoom on a film image quite a lot. But with digital cameras it's imposible, unless you have more megapixels.
With a 800MPixel (low noise) camera you didn't ever need a zoom again (only a gitial one in the preview screen to ). So you can get a 28000x28000 image and later make any crop you need with The Gimp.
A good zoom lenses may be very, very expensive.
A just don't know how cheap can get a very high resolution low noise sensor.
My city: Barcelona.
I have a canon powershot A40, which is now five years old. It's a 2 megapixel camera and was a pretty good thing for the time. Over the years I've learned to make pictures with it that I can fix in photoshop. The ccd sensor provides plenty of detail but the camera software will seriously affect image quality unless you intervene. Images tend to be overexposed, slightly blueish with too much contrast. Now underexposure is really easy to fix. Overexposure on the other hand means white areas in the picture with no detail whatsoever. Similarly, contrast improving algorithms are lossy: they actually throw away a lot of detail. So what I do is shoot pictures with the manual mode that are a bit underexposed. Then I load them up in photoshop and fix them. First I fix the levels. Then, if necessary, I add a curves layer to boost shadow detail a bit. Finally I adjust the color balance to compensate for the blue (especially shots with snow in them). I try not to use the brightness and contrast controls as both are lossy (just look at what happens to the histogram if you use them).
Good camera software should not get in the way of this process. Unfortunately, many cameras do get in the way deliberately. Basically all the low end cameras try to 'fix' the photo in the camera so the users don't have to. The end result with the better ones is not that bad but you'd be able to get much more out of the photo if you'd have the raw material in photoshop. That's why all the highend cameras support the raw format.
What I would like is a compact high end camera. Even the pros adit it: they shoot most shots with some cheap compact camera instead of the bulky SLR they leave home most of the time. I don't have an SLR and I don't think I want one. I do want some of the features though. My compact high end camera of choice would sport great image quality, raw format support, full control over everything (and some convenient defaults for most) and good camera software that does not throw away detail on my behalf.
I'm seriously considering the canon S80. If it had raw support I would have bought it already.
Jilles
This guys wrong. Image stabilization, camcorder crap, thats here already. Anyone can predict yesterday.
How about better form factors? Casio S500 is 0.65 inches thikc. Thats tiny, tiny in the way that counts, fits great in your pocket, no bulge. Dad's got a really tiny minolta, but its still too thick to be really comfortable in pocket. Sony's got a nice touchscreen (with a hideous ugly bevel around it). Drop in a massively telescoping lense, a bigger higher sensitivity lower noise CCD... oh fantastic. Reduce shutter lag to nothing, add in better shot bracketing and rapid firing. Others?
The other big advancement would be when someone thermally insulates the CCD and adds in a thermocoupler. Cool down that CCD and drop the noise, yesh, yesh! That'd be damned good sensitivity. Figuring out how to work the power consumption would be tough.
On the other hand, the escallating megapixel war does partially negate the need for better optical zoom. I figure a 18 megapixel sensor is to my old 2 megapixel Olympus C-720 as a 15x optical would be to a 3x optical; the same dpi, same resolution.
there really isnt such a thing as a "high enough" resolution. i mean, for security purposes, the higher the resolution, the better use it can be at identifying a person. also if you could see the detail ever so closely, like zooming in, on a picture you took, it would also be cool. furthermore, photographers would like to print images on large paper, like a poster. oh and im sure there are plenty of guys out there that would appreciate higher resolution porn. :P
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What I really want is cameras that are smart enough to generate a 3D model of the subject being "photographed". Perhaps this could be done by replacing the traditional "shot" with multiple high-speed shots from slightly different angles. It could even do analysis both before and after the shot to improve precision.
Now that we have as many megapixels as we need, it's time to look at increasing dynamic range to compete with film.
:)
I regularly print 15x10" from my 6MP camera, and they look fantastic - I'd rather have less issues with blown highlights or lost shadows than more MP. Lower noise at higher ISO would also be nice
I have a canon ixus 50 (which I'm very pleased with, works perfect in linux, long battery time and apparently the best compact camera according to many tests) but I didn't buy it because of the megapixel thing, that's not interesting at all.. personally, I use my photos to show friends etc over the net like any other person, but never prints em on a printer, I just don't see the reason myself. I use a digital album over a analogue one any day.
So here's the thing, I find myself very often to take pictures on the lowest resolution setting (640x480) just because I don't want to post-process the files afterwards, makeing it perfect to publish on the web without friends complaining "it's too big!". And no, I don't even wanna run a script to imagemagick them down for me...
When taking more "important" pictures which I know I will edit, of course I turn it up to somewhere like 1600x1200 even if it supports som rediculus resolution like 2592x1944....
It's more important that the images I do take becomes sharp and with good colours. I know my camera isn't the best for dark photography because it (as a compact camera it is) has much noise then.
"In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over"
People will happily pay for many more pixels, so that their camera, after automatically increasing depth of field and compensating for camera motion, still delivers that 4M to 6M image.
On top of that, many people will want even more pixels, distributed over multiple lenses. Imagine the following:
Apart from the obvious p-word application, such technology could be used to auto-generate game characters (Play yourself in Duke Nukem forever)
I'm still perplexed by the lack of built in GPS in higher end digital cameras. I think location & orientation information would be huge, and surely doable righ now, especially with the recent advances in GPS technology. Imagine going on vacation and being able to pull all that handy GPS info right into something like Google Earth. Now thats handy.
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
I was checking strings from my Kodak Easyshare C310 firmware and noticed interesting stuff. First one was "Altek RAW Image" and the second about a debug menu which has the option to enable RAW images. Now that would be a kick ass option for a 100 camera. Does anyone know how to access the debug menu?
My film based pictures will be viewable for decades even hundreds of years. As is my 85 yro father's pictures as a 5 year old in his mothers arms.
How do I store digitals images that 1) Will last (CDs last 10 years max) 2) In a technology that will be available to read it in 100 years. I don't even expect CD players to be available in 20 years!
No body has answered this question. Which is why I shoot film.
My current wishlist for a camera seems like it would be rather simple to implement, giving today's current state of technology.
Built-in HDD (a mini 5gb drive would do) - Considering how I increasingly use my Canon Powershot for filming video (it does an excellent job), it'd be nice to have that extra storage instead of the 1gb SD card i'm currently rocking.
WiFi - I realize that this is starting to become a reality, but the choices of what you can do with it are not. I'd just like to be able to upload to the photo dump of my choice. Flickr perhaps?
swanker than you
$5000 to $8000? Balloney. You can shoot RAW with almost every DSLR, and with medium to high end point & shoots.
And whoever says the megapixel war is over has another thing coming.
What do you think the manufacturers are going to do? Quit working on image sensors? Nikon will offer a point & shoot that handles 10 mp. What do you think Canon and Sony will do? Sit back and put out an advertisement that says, "Hey, the MP war is over, don't worry about what Nikon just offered, our 8 mp does just fine by itself."
It won't hold water.
Your twisted perception is held by the fact tha we've not seen a big jump. Just like CPU speed in the 80's and 90's, we saw big jumps every 18 months.
My last DSLR purchase was 6mp, 2 years ago. I'm ready for a new DSLR, the one I'm looking at is 12.8 mp (Canon's 5D.) It came out 5-6 months ago. I'm going to see what happens at the PMA convention, and probably waste my tax return on a new camera. Is 12.8 mp the end of the line for DSLRs? Hardly. In the next few weeks, you might hear some crazy numbers. In a year or so, Canon will probably offer a bigger and better camera offering more MP.
Just because YOU think that 7-8 megapixels might be enough (for a 13-19" print), doesn't mean that the next generation of camera buyers are going to be satisfied. Manufacturers will continue to compete on all fronts, and megapixels are the easiest number for the average person to understand. There are other features coming to. Image stabilization, better white balance settings, etc. But megapixels are first and foremost the most important measure of a camera. Don't forget it.
I'd be quite happy with a digicam that took photos at 1920x1080 or even a multiple of that, say 3840x2160, in the aspect ratio of all future TVs and monitors (ok, 16:10 seems to be the monitor ratio thanks to stupid Microsoft and their idea of having HD res PLUS room for taskbar.... but close enough).
Anyone else notice how digicams all take 4:3 pictures these days no matter how high end they are, just as the public is moving to 16:9 as the default ratio?
So....
any digicams out there ahead of the pack and already implementing widescreen resolutions by default?
I would think that a 1920x1080 camera phone would be quite the sweet spot for storage and speed while preserving good quality pictures for viewing on TVs direct from the camera....
Anyone?
Visceral Psyche Films
There probably won't be a huge demand for 10+ megapixel cameras, but they aren't entirely useless, either. Walgreens.com offers the option of turning your digital photos into posters, at at those very large sizes even 8 MP might not be as clear as you'd hope. Also, having insane resolution could be kinda neat. Imagine taking a group shot of a few dozen people and being able to zoom in on each face without losing clarity.
The next step needs to be color resolution. The latest and greatest advancements in good old analog film technology in recent years has given us film stocks with a range of about 10-11 stops. This gives you the ability to over- or under-expose by a couple of stops and still have tons of decent usable information in the image. Try that with even the best digital camera today, and you're screwed. Your whites clip out at 100%, or your blacks get swallowed at 0 (or just turn into noise), and no amount of post-processing software, even on a RAW image, is going to get it back. Right now, the only digital solution is to bracket your exposures. Works great when you have lots of time and your subjects don't move. For fast, on-the-go shots, there's no way.
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That's why I was so excited by Foveon's X3 direct image technology, which uses three color sensors at each pixel location. None of this RGB checkerboard crap.
I was hoping that the obvious advantages of this technology would take over the marketplace and make the old style camera imagers go the way of the 8-track tape. Unfortunately, the Foveon imaging chip is only used by a small niche of high end cameras with correspondingly high price tags. I had hoped that there would be enough demand for the improved quality that these imagers can provide that adoption would be wide enough for high volume economics to push the price down. Well... I can still hope
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
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One camera brand, Miranda, had an especially thin body, which allowed other brands' lenses to be used with an adapter without losing infinity focus.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Megapixels aren't dead, though they may be dead as a buzzword. The reasons for going beyond the current level are many, but would probably be sold by the features they enable, not "megapixels". For example, the problem with digital versus optical zoom is that you lose image fidelity. That's not a problem if you have far more image fidelity than you need. So, pack on some more megapixels and the need for optical zoom greatly diminishes. Add a wide angle lens and the need to aim the camera greatly diminishes. Now, instead of point and shoot, you just shoot and then perform your cropping and zooming after the fact. Taking a bad picture is much harder.
We can also gain a lot by techniques like those used with the Foveon sensor. Stacking the sensors so that there are multiple sensors per pixel while maintaining the same pixels does achieve noticeable image differences.
How about more light frequencies? Using other frequencies to add definition to low light shots would be very useful.
We can also spend many years in a race to get more sensitivity with less noise. Eliminating the need for a flash in any lighting condition beyond total darkness would be awesome.
How about a multiexposure feature. Instead of a single read and clear of the sensors after a fixed time, read them again and again and again without clearing them and store all of the results. Offer up the best guess at which is the best exposure, but allow the user to adjust it. Offline processing would then have the information to do things like combine the short exposure information of well lit foreground subjects with long exposure information of background subjects.
And you may want to do that with some pixels while taking separate snaps at intervals timed by a camera shake sensor with others. With this and enough resolution and sensor speed, you could take advantage of the camera shake to obtain info necessary to construct the third dimension. i.e. same shot with slightly different angles. In the shorter term, a binocular camera with two megapixel sensors could get you the same thing.
Anyway, if the camera manufacturers have any vision at all, the megapixel war will only be over in name. In fact, the real war has just begun.
a) Can't overload on resolution per se ;) I'd rather have a good 5MP sensor than a poor 7MP one, but holding quality constant (to the degree that can be done), I definitely want more resolution.
:) A foot or so greater distance, and that detail which IMO makes the shot much more interesting would have been a blur -- is she holding a shopping list there? In the best of all possible worlds, every shot would be perfectly composed to include the elements the photog wants, forever. *My* reality is that I've never thought "Boy, I'm glad *this* isn't higher res!" unless the picture happens to incude me.
a^) a bright, wide lens coupled with ultra-mega resolution has one advantage over a big telephoto, in that it's easier for a wide lens to be bright. There are some cameras with constant brightness (or nearly so) through their range, but the cameras I've ever owned are much darker extended. The wide / bright / hi-res combination has downsides, too -- long lenses allow effects wide ones don't, and don't distort edges in the same way.
b) Sure -- given druthers / realities, including that infinite resolution just isn't possible, a telephoto lens is good and important -- I'm glad I have one on my camera! Even when cameras have 30MP typical, I'm sure I'll still want some degree of zoom. But I know that lots of my photos end up with areas of detail that I wish I could zoom in on and in on; last night I was pleased to find that I could actually read the (incredibly sappy, adolescent) poetry in the hand of a girl whose photo I took several years ago with a 3.1MP Nikon Coolpix. In that case, it worked
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The article talks about how digital SLRs are just too big and that one of the major technical challenges will be to shrink them. NOBODY WANTS A FREAKIN' SMALLER SLR. Canon's Digital Rebel XT is too small already and a lot of users have issues with it's small size. If you are using an SLR, you aren't looking for something that fits in your shirt pocket. You want quality. Quality optics means long lenses and large sensors. The camera needs to be big enough to be comfortably gripped by TWO hands. The author is a retard.
"They tell you the camera has 8MP, but "forget" to mention that in reality it has 4M green pixels and 2M of each red and blue. And there's a blurring filter in front of the sensor to reduce moire. So if you photograph fall foliage, your 8MP camera turns into a 2MP one at best. In the BEST case, it's a 4MP camera really, not 8MP.
The only sensor that takes full RGB readings at each sensor location is Foveon, but it suffers from inferior color reproduction and lower ISO sensitivity. It's also pretty low on "real" pixel count - currently at around 3.5MP (which in Canon/Nikon terminology would be called 10MP, because each pixel takes full RGB readout). Foveon pictures are extremely sharp, though, and render textures very well."
This utterly fails to take into account how the human visual system works. It also fails to take into account the necessity of filtering when sampling. It also fails to take into account the sophistication of current interpolation algorithms.
The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.
It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).
As technical bunch we should be able to understand that optimization is sometimes better than brute force. By tilting the sensor toward green, it is tilted toward luminance capture and tilted toward the way humans view details.
In thousand of empirical comparison online, parity is reached when there is an approximately equal number of green sensors. So 6MP bayer (3MP green) where approximate equal to 10.2MP foveon chip with ~3MP green. Actual 10MP bayer (5MP green) cameras like Nikon D200 easily capture much more detail than Sigmas 10.2MP chip.
The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:
http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/DigPhotog/alias/
Scroll to the photo comparison at the end. The only extra detail in the Foveon based image is Aliasing errors. These are extremely prevalent in Sigma images with sharp diagnals, or repeating patterns beyond the Nyquist frequency of the sensor.
In the end, bayer is an excellent engineering optimization to do more with less. The real comparison that counts is how does it compare with film. A 6mp Bayer sensor in an DSLR is already better than 35mm film. By 10MP it is significantly better.
The other important factor is how the bayer DPI translates in the printed image. I have found that around 240 DPI is close to optimal image quality. So a Canon 350D with a 3456 pixel image width can produce a superb quality image about 14 inches wide. Be aware this is not to say you can't print larger. This is highly subjective depending on source material, but with detailed material this is the point where I consider that you would be hard pressed to notice any improvement from more pixels.
So even if you only want to print 13"x19" I think you could still see improvement from more pixels if printing detailed subjects like landscapes.
You can argue the quandry of subject, material and view distance till the cows come when considering viable prints size. I mere wish to express what I consider the
Who the crap stores numeric values as ASCII?
I know it's peripheral to your point, but unless you were packing the data specifically into a char or a short, sizeof(int) on the average machine nowadays is 4 bytes, and sizeof(float)--a float will carry at least that many floating point digits--is also 4 bytes.
But that's just nitpicking.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You can also mess up your images if you're using an inferior RAW converter. Check out some comparisons vs dcraw here and here.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
3 mp photo can barely be enlarged past 5x7 without showing unacceptable effects.
Yet, I can take a 35mm image to 20x30 with fewer effects. (I have one hanging over my fireplace)
I'm still waiting for 10mp to seriously consider digital cameras as more than toys.
If you're just doing landscapes that don't jostle with the wind or still lifes, you can stitch together a couple shots using panotools and Hugin to make an arbitrarily big image. It's not for every application, but it can work wonders.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Digicams are generally considered useless for any sort of evidential use, because of photoshop. But they could become far better than film by the simple expedient of embedding a cryptographic signature generator. You could connect to the camera, download pictures like normal, download detached signatures for each photo, download the x509 certificate embedded into that one camera which was used to sign them. The private key itself being inside a tamper-resistant chip, and therefore the signatures are definitive. Combine this with time, date and GPS location shown on the photo, and you have a sure winner for any situtation where proof is important. Eg: time-dependent business contracts, evidence gathering by law enforcement, private detectives, etc.
You may say "what? DVDs are 720x480". The horizontal resolution in NTSC isn't specified, since NTSC isn't digital, it's really a question of how much bandwidth is available in the system you are transmitting it through. Traditionally, TV channels had perhaps 320 lines of resolution horizontally over the air (6MHz channel). Satellite and digital cable have 480 lines. DVD of course has 720 lines. One format supported on ATSC (digital over-the-air TV) is 852x480, but that is for 16:9 use.
So really 640x480 is full res (480i). Good cameras have been able to capture 640x480x30fps (480i) until your memory card fills up (which isn't too long). The two most recent generations of pocket Canons (SD400, SD410, SD500, SD510, etc.) will capture 640x480x60fps (480p) until your memory card fills up if you'd like.
In the end, these made decent camcorders, some things like camera shake, low capacity storage, or that the lens system on camera isn't made to maintain focus during zooming make them less than ideal. These problem could probably be fixed and probably will be as digital camera/camcorder hybrids become more popular (perhaps it's already fixed on Sony's M series of cameras).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The Canon PowerShot S2 IS has this feature. It will take three shots at different focus points, and you can adjust how far apart the focus is. I own one, it's fantastic. To see some examples of what it can do, visit my Pacific Northwest picture page.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Your flat statement
is utter rubbish, completely nonsensical. 35mm what? Film has grain & grain determines its resolution. What ISO? whose film? Are you going to tell me a 10mp is better than some 25 ISO ultra-fine B&W? Is 3200 iso 35mm worse than a 10mp for lowlight indoors? 35mm is amazing because its adaptable.
"7MP or 8MP". ROFL. Because Nikon's biggest selling consumer camera, the D70, is 6MP. What a hack.
I don't believe that the megapixel race is over, with all due respect to Mr. Westfall.
1. Given two cameras, both having the exact same other features and similar price, would you go for the 8 megapixel model or the 12 megapixel? Marketplace competition dictates higher numbers, especially for the uninformed masses.
My question would be at what point does the resolution of the CCD surpass the lens optics of the camera?
2. Forensics- yes, this would be a small market segment, but I can imagine times when magnification of digital images to detect evidence would come into play. Think of the scene in the movie Blade Runner, when Deckard is studying and manipulating (and magnifying greatly) the digital photos..
3. It has been touched upon by others, but the ability to print big posters or murals with excellent clarity would be another reason for ultra-megapixels.
I'm not so certain that the Canon S80 is what you are really looking for. My Canon S110
// Canon 3x Optical Zoom // Auto/BestShot/AP/SP/Manual/Movie Modes // Exposure/WB/Focus Bracketing // Ext.Flash // even a Remote!6 40x480 // 3 JPG + RAW
(2.1 MP) recently crapped out. When I went shopping for its replacement, I was surprised
by the features (and pricing) on a demo model Casio (Exilim) EX-P700 digital camera.
7.0 MP
ISO640 equivilent
3072x2304/3072x2048/2304x1728/1600x1200/1280x960/
Would I like more/better? You bet: 12 - 15 MP, plus better dynamic range (ISO2000).
But this camera has prosumer-level features, and I bought it for USD $360. It will do.
BTW: Penn Camera was also the ONLY bricks-and-mortor shop where ALL their cameras
actually worked, as opposed to non-functioning gear and idiot salespeople.
OK, so what do I get?
It looks like I need a large sensor, a big arpature, and perhaps image stabilization. Oddly, these features are only available on big heavy monster cameras full of fragile little moving parts. I mean, really, a mirror that has to flip up out of the way when I take a picture? WTF? No live preview? But anyway...
Trying to keep the cost below $1000, I came up with:
They all kind of suck. The DSLR design is so film-oriented, but cameras with saner designs all have tiny little sensors.
I dislike the complexity and weight of DSLRs, but I'll get one if I have to. It seems that this is the only way to get a physically large sensor. (and, perhaps, a decent lens)
I kind of need to keep this under $1000. Much less would be wonderful. I've been thinking about these mostly:
Those get me from 321 to 351 square mm of sensor actually used. (that is, not counting parts that get cropped off because they extend beyond what the lens can focus on) I don't know what else to go on for getting sharp low-noise photos in dim light.
That last point applies even to the DSLRs that give sensor sizes in mm. Watch out! The actively used part may be much smaller that you think.
BTW, one of the irritating things about the dpreview web site is that it doesn't let you sort by the active sensor area, or by anything else related to producing low-noise images in dim light.
SimpleViewer requires the Flash Player
No can do. Flash isn't Open Source, and thus isn't available for my system. (even if I did like running something that might be spyware)
The Konica-Minolta cameras move the image sensor.
The other brands move stuff in the lens if you buy the fancy lenses.
The DSLRs are mostly 3:2. That's the same as 15:10, 16:10.666, or 14.333:9.
(the same as film)
You still are going to need higher in higher resolution in digital cameras so that more effects at higher quality can be made over time. Some picture effects may require high res photos. You also need better cameras so that lawyers :( and policemen and also scientists could zoom in to insanely large zoom levels.
or leica digilux 2. They're both the same, one just sports the red dot and a copy of photoshop elements with it. I own the LX1. It's 8mp and native 16x9 and saves RAW files if you want.
A given piece of film can only have one sensitivity, but digital cameras now let you choose the ISO you want for your photo. Is there a technology yet that will use multiple ISOs in the same shot in order to get everything properly lit, or at least closer to it?
I don't know whether that would look good or not, but it would probably produce more usable pictures for things like security cameras.
If it does look good, and you could combine it with the "multiple focus" technology liked to by supersat here, you could basically point and shoot at random, then sit down later to crop and refocus the picture until it's perfect.
Why do people say the same stupid things decade after decade?
Doesn't anybody pay attention?
That (GPS coordinates of photos I take) is by far at the top of the list of things I miss in a camera (especially now that I finally got to buy a camera I'm satisfied with, an EOS 350D).
Such things apparently do exist, e.g. see http://www.geospatialexperts.com/, but alas, it's not wide-spread enough.
Maybe now that the GPS technology is getting more and more exposure, and maybe with the competition picking up from the European Union initiative, we'll see it in the nearer future?
Have you ever tried shooting fall foliage with Bayer sensor based camera? It quickly turns fine detail in read leaves into mush.
If you're interested, here is my gallery of sample pix taken with the lx1 in varying lighting, contrasty situations, backlit, and using the OIS. I have another gallery with sample pix at iso 400 both with and without NR and RAW versus jpg files. You can find it via navigating the site.
http://ceciland.smugmug.com/gallery/970572
enjoy scoping out the camera. :)
Ceci
Digital cameras with high dynamic range essentially allow the same thing as multiple ISOs in a frame. *That's* what I'm looking to get better in future cameras. Right now, I expose to not blow highlights and have to rescue the shadows in post processing. So presently, you can appoximate it by getting a lower noise camera. With it the shadows won't be too noisy and they hold detail remarkably well even in almost black areas.
I remember about a year ago Wired had an article about having a GPS and compass integrated with modern day digital cameras. The camera would then embed metadata into each image file which not only had a timestamp, but a lat/long coordinate set as well as a bearing (which way the camera was facing).
The point of this is that you could then begin to organize your archives by time AND location and would make our trillions and trillions of digital photos able to be better indexed.
Did anyone else read this?
Libertas in infinitum
On the aliasing, I agree that in the example shown it does not look good - I thought it was pointing to detail in teh sweater. However I can say that after 30-40k shots that I almost never see such aliasing, perhaps the microlenses in teh SD-10 reduce the effect.
Take comparable lenses, shoot the same subject under the same light in RAW mode.Then compare an 8MP bayer camera and it will capture marginally more detail than the sigma.
In tests I've seen it comes out about equal. As I noted you cannot really give an exact Bayer MP to Foveon MP translation, because the amount of detail captures varies based on subject matter.
However I would say that your inability to produce a shot equivlilent in quality from any other camera is telling. Indeed I found it so when I was looking at cameras and very closley comparing samples between the Canon 350D (or whatever it was at the time), teh D70 and the Fuji. I simply saw more detail in the Foveon images at full size - when I could even find full-sized images form other cameras.
It's one thing to present theory arguing a problem with a camera, but enough time has passed that some theorys have been disproven by a vast body of work. Color innacuracy is one such theory; alsiing problems are another. And the Foveon being a lot better for landscape work than any 6MP (and even probably 8MP) Bayer cameras is one of those thing I consider pretty well proven at this point by real-world images - as I said, especially so in large prints.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For a more modern discussion of the Foveon chip, please view this currently active thread on DPReview:
1 000&message=17047342
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=
Another point brought up I had forgot about is the Foveon's chip inherant advantage of collecting a lot more photons than Bayer cameras get to see.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Basically, I took all the bytes and split them into 8 bits, and then put all of the bit 8's at the start of the file, and all of the bit 7's next, and so on. If you converted this data back into an image, you would see 8 copies of the image.
The technique you describe is called planar compression. It separates an image into bit planes and then compresses each bit plane with a codec designed for bilevel images such as JBIG or a 1D cellular automaton based predictive codec.
The second image would still be fairly recongizable, but when you got to the last of the 8 images what you would be looking at is a lot of noise.
PROTIP: Using a Gray code before separating the planes of a continuous-tone image will get you one more useful bit plane than using a natural binary code.
so maybe TIFF is using huffman and PNG is using arithmetic coding.
I haven't investigated the compression used in TIFF, PNG uses a difference filter followed by deflation. A difference filter subtracts each pixel from those above and to the left of it and then stores the difference; reconstruction involves adding the difference back to the pixels used to create the difference. Deflation is the general purpose codec introduced in PKZIP and used in gzip and zlib, based on LZ77 followed by Huffman compression. It doesn't use arithmetic codes because those were still patented when PNG was being invented.
You can actually get an EOS body to F lens adapter. It's purely mechanical, so no autofocus or automatic aperture, but since the Canon EF lens mount is shorter and wider, Nikon lenses can be mechanically mounted, and focus to infinity (no extension tube effect). See Wikipedia and Bob Atkins for more information. I've acquired some stunningly cheap manual-focus Nikon F-mount lenses which work quite well with my Digital Rebel.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Really, even at 8MP, your main concern for cropping is not sensor resolution but *lens* resolution. At 8MP 1:1 anything but good prosumer or pro lenses is a fuzzy blur. Even if you had 40MP in your sensor, cropping an 8MP section of it wouldn't look near as nice as an actual 8MP picture right out of the sensor, because the lens has finite resolution too.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
You can take the image exactly as it was recorded by the sensor, and manipulate the white balance, color balance, and many other settings that are often performed automatically.
White balance and color balance are merely amplifications and waveshapes of each channel. You can do that with the Curves dialog in Photoshop or GIMP.
Python might be a very inefficient language to run, but with the increasing power of modern processors, this isn't as much a problem.
"Modern processors" may be present in PCs, but because Pentium class CPUs are so expensive to manufacture and to power, they're not as common in handheld devices such as cameras.
...I was reminded of the fact that Apple started it all. Not so much that they invented digital cameras, but they were the first to produce a consumer digital camera. I got to play with one back in the mid 90s. I rented it for about $40 for a day and went out to shoot a bunch of photos. I then took them to my girlfriend's Mac and pulled them in. I had to go through this cycle a few times because the storage was internal to the camera and transfers were time consuming. Just as with the iPods today, Apple was first on the scene with digital cameras and barely anyone remembers that. I wonder how the iPod will fare a little over a decade from now?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I went to try downloading originals of the images with aliasing problems to see if more modern conversions still had issues - however those images taken no longer seem to exist anywhere on Imagining Resources.com.
If you are going to provide a link on aliasing issues with Sigma cameras, at least try to find one that involves the SD-10 and more modern processing tools.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Many posts here say that you don't need more megapixels for ordinary size of printed photos. But maybe in future someone will find a way to increase resolution of photo paper? and what about using those high res photos in some future high res video projectors or tft with cool zooming etc..
BTW, it would be nice to know a "max. resolution of an average eye" if it exists..
You obviously have your own wants, but it seems to me that a 16:9 ratio wastes lens material. I would prefer a square format, for one reason would be to eliminate the need to tilt a camera for "portrait" vs. "landscape". Most lenses I've seen are round. This is a production issue (from manufacture to ensuring that the optical centers of the lens elements all align). Ideally, to take advantage of the entire circular image produced, you would want a circular sensor. For film, this is a waste of film, because roll film is suited towards a rectangular or square format. From an electronic sensor(wafer manufactured) standpoint, you would want square or rectangular sensors (for dicing). I think that a square format would be best for all, because it takes better advantage of the circular image. One could then crop it in whatever way that meets your needs. The viewfinder (electronic or otherwise) could have markings for the different common ratios.
Or I could envision a sensor in a cross type pattern (though I'm not sure from a manufacturability standpoint). This way you could have a square central sensor flanked by some rectangular sensors on the sides and top to fill out the circumscribed circle that the lens produces. I don't know if it is feasible to join sensors seamlessly. Has this been done? Can one make a larger CCD by mounting the silicon imaging device (or whatever substrate they use) seamlessly? Do CCDs connect electronically from the edges or from the backside?
I know very little about CCDs or other sensors and how they operate, so maybe I'm ill informed on these issues. It is just my observation that every lens assembly I've seen (i.e. every camera lens is made up of multiple lens elements) is round, and as such produces a circular image (though they are often cropped by lens hoods).
FTA: 'Will the under-the-skin nanocomputers of 2100 still recognize JPEG files?'
No. One day, in 2100 you'll wake up, and nanocomputers will have replaced our systems, creating destruction and terror across the land. Doesn't technology like...evolve? If people want to see pictures in their nanocomputers, then I am certain vendors will accomodate that.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
Well, I just have to say that it also comes down to the photographer as well. My girlfriend just got her hands on a very nice 4 MP digital camera that has taken better pictures than some 7 MP cameras I've seen. It's all about the lighting techniques sometimes.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I'll continue to follow the discussion as well, I have to say I'm not too interested in continuing offline as I've had (and read) the same discussions for years on end. I'll post if anything new comes up in the thread. I would reccomend posting there as you'll get a more technically detailed answer than I am really qualified to give on certain points.
BTW, great taste in music (and I mean that seriously!).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
JPEG stores 3 primary colors (Red Green Blue). Around 5% of caucasian males have nonstandard red or green sensors, so EVERYTHING looks wrong to them. Our eyes sense 3 colors (RGB -> BY, RG), but they could be modified to handle 4 colors (ROGB -> BO, RG), indeed some women do sense 4 primary colors today. The way to do colors accurately for everyone no matter what sensors they have is to divide the spectrum into narrow bands (let's have 12 of them) and reproduce each band at each pixel accurately.
We'd need 12-color monitors, transparent OLED displays to the rescue! There are actually a few cameras that capture 4 primary colors today, like the Sony F828. There are already 12-color printers (giclees), but we always go through 3 colors in the middle today. Boo. That's a software problem, we need to preserve all those dimensions going from the camera to the printer. Going from one set of colors to another is just a linear transformation.
If you're going to have 12 types of narrowband sensors, you can't affort to lose 11/12 of all photons that fall on each sensor. You'd need to stack the sensors like Foveon or use a light-splitter or such.
Lenses refract each color differently, so purple lands a few pixels out from where red lands. That's the downfall of CMYG sensors. Narrowband sensors have all the colors in each sensed range refract similarly, so the sensed ranges don't smear, and the camera could correct for the differences between the bands after the fact.
On the cheapest digital cameras with the really small sensors and limited optics/manual controls, the possibilities of night photography are seriously compromised.
However, things improve while moving up towards the high-end equipment. For example, my 20D DSLR can take exposures limited only by the battery life and noise won't be a problem unless your exposure goes in tens of minutes range, which is more than sufficient to shoot with moonlight only.
Some of my favourite night photos in Flickr have been done by this guy and he's using a DSLR:
http://flickr.com/photos/notraces/sets/270103/
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
One of my three lenses (70-300 DO IS USM) has the image stabilization. It does not rely on any software trickery, but instead has a separate lens group that is moved to counteract the shaking of the lens, resulting to a significant reduction in lens shake; the advertised value is about three stops. It's not a complete replacement for tripod (if your target moves in non-linear way, there's little or no help from the IS and it does not help with truly long exposures), but an useful feature nonetheless.
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Some information about how Canon does it:
http://www.photozone.de/8Reviews/canonFAQ.htm#3Q6
I suppose this is more or less similar to how other manufacturers do it (well, in some cases the sensor is moved instead of an internal lens group, but it's still not 'fake')
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
This is by no means a scientific study, but interesting anyway.
Digital vs. analog shootout
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith