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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.'"
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.
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?
Image Stabilisation. Low-light performance improvement. Battery Life.
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
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?
Once you go beyond about 5 megapixels it seems rather rare to be stuck with any one format. My Lumix (Panasonic) FZ30 (8mp) does does raw or tiff in addition to jpeg, but the CCD has a lot of noise in low light situations so the extra memory requirement may not be justified.
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'm the grandparent, just not logged in because I'm in a public place.
JPEG is a balance between size and quality, I realize this. So do you, I guess. I also have a 20D, and several 35mm Canons--I'm a fan of macro photography. However, shoot your scenes with both RAW+JPEG when you get the chance, using superfine compression, and compare for yourself.
The 20D's JPEG encoder is terrible. It's optomized for battery life: low processor usage. Photoshop can produce *****much***** better results from tiffs converted from RAW. Canon's encoder produces all sorts of noise, particularly in out-of focus areas, and otherwise kills small detail badly... In other words, it screws up good bokeh! It produces so much noise as to be utterly unacceptable (to me) when working with any sort of depth of field, both in macro and portraiture--even when using low iso (the RAW isn't noised up, but the JPEG is), and it can blur out smaller details that are preserved in the RAW. Furthermore, JPEG causes nasty banding in areas that should have subtle tonal changes (very smoth gradients, like the sky), and to my eye, it enhances chromatic aberration found on cheaper lenses, and can cause a noticable amount of posterization (again, erasing details). This makes any investment you've got in a good large arperature Canon L lens, for example, absolutely worthless.
Oh, sure, you can fix up much of that in post processing, Neatimage, etc, but you'll spend quite a bit of time doing it, and your good photo will be slightly less good than it would have been otherwise... I've blown some of my macros taken with the 20D up to 25x16 inches, and I've even compared the same image printed at this size from RAW and the identical image printed from JPEG, with no post processing on either. RAW wins by a huge margin. The color is better, there is much less noise, no banding, much nicer histograms, too... And this is not using any additional filtering in the RAW conversion workflow, just in case you're wondering.
Like I said, it's not an issue with 4x6 prints to be hung up on grandmas' fridge, but is definitely apparent at 8x10, and even more so at larger sizes. If you can't tell the difference, you need glasses... But I can understand if you still go with JPEG because you don't want to manage such large files.
I lay out books and magazines for a living, and the vast majority of images that come to us are 300 dpi jpegs, or tiffs and eps's converted FROM jpegs. We routinely print oversized glossy material, which uses trim sizes greater than 8x10 in virtually all cases. We have had no quality issues, and I speak from a production environment.
Resolution is more important than compression method. Ten times out of ten I guarantee you couldn't tell the difference between a RAW file and a Fine JPEG image.
The color problems you speak of are caused by the camera, not jpeg itself. The jpeg file format is capable of rendering in any color space, and provides excellent color reproduction. Problems can arise from the internal jpeg engine in the camera, which in a less expensive model may not accurately convert the raw data from the sensor.
--They say only a fool looks at the finger pointing to the sky...
My camera saves a 7 megapixel image as a 7 megabyte jpeg. For consumer-grade equipment, it's surprisingly high-qualit!. A few days ago, I was shrinking an image to email to my family, when I noticed a 1-pixel spec in Photoshop. Thinking that my lense was dirty, I zoomed in to see that it captured a bird in flight!
No, I will not work for your startup
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.
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.
It seems some people are just going down the road "RAW, nothing else but RAW..." without thinking about this sentence at all. Compare it with mp3 if you want. Try to squeeze a minute of music into an 1MB wave-file and compare that with a minute of music in an 1MB mp3-file. Which will sound better?
If storage space and memory card speed go into the equation at all it will always be better to compress data. This is the point of jpeg, mpeg, mp3...
Hey, the OpenRAW group are currently having a survey. You might want to check it out.
Lalala
A camera that shoots constantly while saving the data to a 60 second cirrcular buffer. I say constantly, but that'd obviously have to be disabled for battery life. User points the camera in the right direction then flips through the memory to find the best pose, lighting etc. Sure, not great for flash lighting but...
.001 second after initial where the users hand has moved.
...o......o......o......o......o
Although you've perked an interesting idea there, the top of my wish list contains a GPS enabled camera that stamps each photo with date, time and location. Maybe even voice recognition for tagging. I hate getting home to find image001, image002, image003... Ever seen a camera like that?
Oh, and while were on the subject have a thought at this: A camera with a built in gyroscope or accelerometer. Its purpose is to convert the shaking from the users hand into higher resolution! See, for every pair of photo pixels there are a shitload of world pixels lying between that never get captured. However, if the camera knew what direction the user was shaking it could decide when the camera's pixels were pointing at the unrecorded world pixel and save them. See below: "O" is a camera pixel, "." is a world pixel. The first line is the initial exposure while the second line is the same scan line
o......o......o......o......o
I am one of those photographers. I make large prints often 30x40 and shoot largeand medium format film. I am pretty nervous about the day I can no longer get a box of 4x5 film and hope technology makes it possible to still get great prints at these sizes. 8 megapixels doesn't cut it. Of course, a large format camera can take a digital back if you have the money for such a beast, but it isn't so practical if you do photography that is off the grid like I do.
There is a medium-format digital back that came out recently with 38-megapixels. Something tells me that by the time your film goes the way of the dodo there will be quite a few options available for you to do the same quality work with digital that you've been doing with film. Printing at 30x40 is a piece of cake even for the 16MP Canon 1Ds Mark II. Is it going to have the same resolution if you look at it with a magnifying glass? No, but what are you doing looking at a poster with a magnifying glass? Unless you're printing billboard-size, you aren't actually seeing all that resolution under most circumstances. If you really do have the skill and the audience that require all that resolution I'm sure you'll be able to afford a digital solution in the near future that will closely approximate what you're doing with film, if not surpass it eventually. Think of it as an opportunity rather than a roadblock.
A good site to check out if you haven't seen it already is luminous-landscape.com, where the owner of the site is an experienced professional photographer who has done some interesting comparisons between digital and film and found to his own amazement that digital has now surpassed the image quality of 35mm film and is working on overtaking even medium-format. That was a couple of years ago. Looks like there is a recent article by another large-format photographer that you may find very interesting, comparing the 4x5 film you use with the very 38MP back that I mentioned earlier. Happy reading:
http://luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml
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.