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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.'"
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.)
...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.
Try running Mozilla Seamonkey on 1 GHz hardware. It's possible, but not enjoyable. And remember, that's just an email client and a web browser. Likewise, try running OpenOffice. Again, it's not a good experience, even on a system with 1 GB or more of RAM.
Don't ever underestimate the ability of software to become far more bloated, and less efficient. It's a problem that has plagued the industry for years.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
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.
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.
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'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
My "real" camera's lens is bigger than my cell phone. Just because of optical limitations alone, you'll never have a decent camera in a cell phone.
That must be why microscope lenses are so crappy.
I'd like to correct your assertion that it's somehow difficult to make a small, sharp, lens. It's far easier to design and build a tack-sharp lens that is 6mm across than to make an equally sharp lens that is 40mm across. Similarly, the larger the lens, the more elements and groups you must add to the design to correct for chromatic aberration, barrel distortion, and other large lens problems.
The sharpest 35mm lens I ever owned was the T* (T-star) Zeiss lens built in to my Yashica T4 point-and-shoot. A 300mm focal length Canon L-Series lens, at ten times the cost of the Yashica is also very sharp, but a very significant cost goes into making it so.
While it's certainly true that a large lens can be designed to be both CH sharp* and relatively simple, this sort of engineering does cost a lot of money. The Heidelberg Tango scanner I use has a relatively small lens (9mm across), yet can resolve a true 11,000 dpi of resolution - microscope-like in it's reach.
All that's lacking from cell-phone cameras is image quality. There are two ways to fix this:
1. Increase image sensor density
2. Put better and better-protected lenses in front of that image sensor - which probably won't happen for cost reasons
A small lens is inherently an advantage for sharpness and a disadvantage for speed.
*Cunt hair sharp - an old photojournalist reference...
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?)
Something that was solved quite some time ago by the early Camedia cameras from Olympus and anything similar to it.
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.
The lack of 'shoulder' is inherent to using a digital representation of an inherently analog thing. It is the same as why too loud sounds clip in digital recordings. Analog fails gracefully when overstretched, digital doesn't.
You can get your 'shoulder' by adding more external light and then turning down brightness in your camera a few stops, so you are less close to the limits of your sensor without adding too much noise, but at the cost of less detail in shadowy areas.
An increase in dynamic range would be nice, 12bits/color would be a good start really, but any 'shoulder' you'd get from that will be artificial, and will always reduce the ability to do details in dark areas because the only way to create such a 'shoulder' is by reserving a part of the dynamic range for this 'shoulder'.
The only solution here is for the photographer to realize that there are inherent differences between analog and digital photography, and that both have their merrits depending on the situation and the desired result.
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!
Ah, that would be so cool to have indeed. Seeing how thios never happened in a few decades of film SLRs, I don't see it happen with their digital equivalent for some time to come however.
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.
No comment on this other then that every camera is different in this, and it is a bloody mess indeed.
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
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.
"7MP or 8MP". ROFL. Because Nikon's biggest selling consumer camera, the D70, is 6MP. What a hack.
A 8MP camera is equivalent to a 4MB camera plus a x2 zoom.
Not quite. An 8MP sensor has sqrt(2) = 1.4 times as many pixels in each direction to get twice as many pixels overall. So it's only equivalent to a 1.4x zoom.
You actually need to go to 16MP to get the equivalent of a 2x zoom on 4MP, which is quite a different proposition.
The other problem of more pixels is the one you mentioned yourself - more noise. A low noise 800MP sensor would be far too big to fit in a normal sized camera.
Patent protection isn't designed to give you protection for all eternity. Patents are about a balance: Encouraging people to innovate by giving them a protected period during which they can capitalize on their own invention before, ultimately, handing the benefits of that encouraged innovation to society at large.
25 years, in the modern world, is arguably far longer than necessary. It'll be the 2020s by the time anyone else can start using that tech. That made sense when it could take many years to build machining tools, build production lines, market in your home town before slowly moving wider, etc. In today's business world, that's no longer true. Even fifty years ago, you could assume that most of the techs discovered today would be valid in 25 years - that's just not true anymore.
Given you can take an idea through to IPO within five years and then build that business to significant dominance within another five, given that you can use that time to develop your tech, adding new patents on the advances, I would argue that ten years - given the pace of modern business - is plenty.
I have a 20 x 30 from my 6 mp SLR sitting next to a 35mm 20 x 30 in my living room. The Digital print simply looks better. While 35 mm film is potentially sharper than a 6 mp digital in practice that doesn't play out. The optical enlargement process loses a lot of sharpness.
I have a number of 35mm cameras - I love the feel of film cameras - but the digital SLR also works well.
And no, I'm not blind. The digital print was done at 300 PPI (54 MP after interpolation and sharpened in the GIMP). It looks very good, and I've gotten a lot of complements on it.
When he gave the talk at UW, I believe his argument was that a technique like this would increase the incentive to drive the image sensor resolutions up beyond what would otherwise be practical, and that Moore's law would take care of the loss of resolution quickly.
It's too bad his talk isn't available online. His was one of the few that wasn't recorded for on-demand streaming over the Internet.