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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.'"
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!
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 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
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.
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...
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.
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