Even an ideal lens becomes diffraction limited at which point 2 things start to happen on the sensor and film. The first one is what is known as false magnification where the smallest feature the lens is capable of resolving is larger than the pixel size. So in this case extra pixels aren't adding anything to the image quality and the only real difference between those adjacent pixels would be the noise in the sensor. This also creates a sort of soft focus, and while you have this huge image there isn't that much information actually there. False magnification happens more often at lower f stops with lower quality lenses and smaller sensors but even is a concern with high quality lenses with full size sensors at higher f stops. Also with diffraction limited images you have the diffraction interference pattern that further degrades your image and leads to loss of detail. Both of these types artifacts are things you are not going to be able to deal with in post processing unless you have a special camera with more advanced optics specifically designed to be used in diffraction limited situations and even then it takes a lot of post processing.
If you want to find out more here is as good article on the subject and be sure to go down to the what it looks like section to see what happens at higher f stops on a higher end camera. Way back in the old days I was taught how to avoid these problems by not shooting at anything higher than f/8 with 100 speed black and white film. Granted that was with a 55mm F/2.8 lens (I think that is what it was) on a Pentax K1000 in high school but that rule still holds today. Granted there were times when you would want to shoot at an f stop higher than 8 but you knew and understood why you were doing that. I still like taking waterfall pictures using a really high f stop with the long exposure but there even though the image is diffraction limited the image really doesn't have a sharp focus anyways because of the mist plus it gives a bit more of an ethereal feel with the soft focus.
I see it in a similar way. Film photography is now like painting something that people do for the artistic quality of the medium. I just wish I could have found the lenses I don't have for my camera (17mm fisheye and 400+mm telephoto) before prices went way up. I still use my very reliable Spotmatic F I got 20 years ago and it has been on almost every continent (haven't made it to Antarctica) and has worked wonderfully.
I just got my pictures back from the camera shop from when I went to Madrid last month. They do a fairly brisk business catering to the film photographer even if the vast majority of their business is on the digital side now. The only down sides I have noticed is that the selection of films has gone down, I miss the old kodachrome and velvia film, prices have gone up, and that I can't go to a mass market retailer when I need film so I have to be sure to have enough on hand. Film photography is not basically where painting is now something that people to for artistic reasons.
I have shot some friends and relatives weddings as a favor for free (It was my wedding gift to them) and even then I spend more than a day. When I did that I would end up spending more than $100 on film and processing, granted I would be using high end film and would shoot 300-500 pictures over the course of the day. Even then the general flow was go to the rehearsal to plan some things and find out what pictures they would like, take pictures all day before during and after the wedding, get the film developed, then sit-down and go through the images find out what ones they really liked, scan the film and touch them up and provide a few DVDs with the images they really like. The lucky couple would then get all of the images, negatives, and digital copies that I touched up so they could make their own. Then again a good SLR body with really good lenses, triggered flashes with reflectors and all the other goodies most amateurs don't have so it was more like a real pro doing it but I just like photography and don't need it as a job.
I had forgotten about Holgas. I have never used one but I imagine their image quality would be on par with those old Kodak Pocket folders that can be gotten on the cheap in pretty good condition. Yes I have an old foldie and it is fun to mess around with from time to time but for overall image quality I'll keep my Spotmatic F and good set of lenses.
Keep in mind that on the low end you can have all the noise reduction you want but it won't overcome the false magnification you get with these small sensors with high pixel counts. Noise reduction here may actually make things worse
Since you stated everything else being the same I still might go for the 16mp one depending on sensor size. On the low end with small sensors that have high pixel counts they have probably already crossed over where having more pixels doesn't offers a better image. At some point the image becomes diffraction limited and the cheap lenses only make that happen sooner. Even on full size sensors in most DSLRs it wouldn't surprise me if some of them were diffraction limited at some higher f stops now.
In the US those flex fuel vehicles are not optimized but a bag of compromises since they are designed to run on everything from E0 (regular unleaded) up to E85 and any combination in between. Also running on E85 isn't going to net you reasonable mileage given the low energy density by fuel volume unless you are running huge compression numbers which since it is a flex fuel vehicle and will probably run on regular 87 octane it seems unlikely this is the case. The lighter alcohol fuels are great at producing power but don't expect good mileage which is what I was trying to get at in the original post.
Hey not all globalization is bad. I personally like German cars, Swiss mechanical watch movement, French cheese and digestifs, Indian silk rugs, British TV, Swedish tools, Japanese and Korean electronics, Dutch toys, large Nepali knives, and Canadian winter boots. What I don't like is the race to the bottom type of globalization that seems to be happening with cheap crap products made to increase profits and would prefer globalization where it is a race to the top in quality.
I don't like what I have seen with the quality going down on what once were great things because someone thought they could save a few cents per item by shipping manufacturing overseas. For example when I looked at small wire feed welders there were a bunch of highly questionable cut every corner ones around the $100 price point and in researching them they might work out of the box for some definitions of work and would likely fail in fairly short order all of which were made in China. From there to the one I got there was nothing but I ended up getting the smallest Hobart that while they cut corners (no thermal switch for the fan so it run all the time and the gas kit was separate but could be added if you didn't want to use flux core wire) it cost ~$270 on sale but came with a great warranty, was made in the US, is heavy as hell, and worked out of the box flawlessly for years.
E85 lacks basic energy, not to mention the hideous cost of manufacturing.
E85 is less energy dense per unit volume of fuel than gasoline, but for a given amount of air you can liberate more energy with E85 than with gasoline. Also E85 has a much higher octane rating than gasoline so you can run higher boost or higher compression. Higher boost allows you to liberate more energy per combustion cycle while higher compression just increased your Carnot Cycle efficiency making better use of the energy you liberated. Either way producing power with alcohol fuels isn't a problem, only the crappy implementation of consumer flex fuel vehicles that are a crappy compromise so they run sub optimally all of the time (maybe they actually run really good if you can get an E42 mix).
Fuel from field corn sucks, but there are better cheaper ways of producing alcohol fuels, like starting with methane and converting it to methanol or working up to heavier alcohols like ethanol, proponol, or butanol. Butanol should be what is pursued as it can be used as a direct gasoline replacement in existing vehicles with very similar properties and energy densities. It also doesn't absorb as much water as ethanol and better mixes with gasoline.
Hey we can't have any of that sensible talk around here. [/sarcasm]
That is one thing I never understood is why a manufacturer just doesn't go fuck it and make a vehicle optimized for E85 and put E85 stickers on it instead of the unleaded fuel only ones now used. Yes it will probably get worse fuel economy (never ran the calculations) when properly optimized but as you pointed out ethanol (including E85) and methanol have some wonderful properties for performance. The 2 biggest are the phenomenal octane rating (high boost or high compression applications), plus another that is over looked in so many discussions, the ability to release more energy for a given volume of air (bad mileage but great power). This is why my project car will be converted to a supercharged alcohol burner. It is old enough that there are no real emission requirements applicable to it so I don't have to worry on that end either.
I do agree that making fuel from field corn was a stupid idea but hey it was a giant give away to the corn industry at the time which wasn't doing all that well (mid to late 90s). Even if we were to decide to use productive fields for growing fuel there are better crops but they don't have a big lobby like corn does. How often to you hear about the sugar cane lobby or the sugar beet lobby, both of whom are small parts of the sugar lobby that also happens to include corn. Either of those produces substantially more fuel per acre than corn but don't get as big of subsidies for growing, or conversion.
Not entirely true. I wondered what happens if you had 2 small neutron stars that collide and I guess they create all sorts of useful things if their combined mass is low enough to not become a black hole. Agreed that if there was just one sitting there it basically does nothing but get some collisions of neutron stars and you get gold. Also when talking about big monsters producing heavy elements you would need something bigger and hotter than Betelgeuse, like a Population III star which are thought to have been fairly common in the early universe and while they are large and when they blow are big enough to destroy their own core and don't create a black hole. So for heavy elements in the early universe these large fast burning monsters might have been able to produce enough. Then again IANAAP (I am not an astro physicist) so I may just be jumping to incorrect conclusions from partial information.
True but the whole purpose of this is to be complaint with the law. No part of the plate would be physically covered by the frame. The Minnesota law clearly states that it has to be a physical covering which this is neither physical nor covering.
I would be very wary of strobing the lights for a number of reasons. the first is that depending on the frequency it may violate laws in my state (60-120 Hz). Second, strobing IR is also used to trigger the lights for emergency vehicles and people have gotten in trouble for that and that seems like a great way to cause all sorts of unintended problems. Finally if you wanted to mess with the cameras you would need to be fairly exact in you timing.
That said having one be photo triggered would be doable but requires additional electronics. So given all that simply having a very bright ring around a substantially darker area would seem to be the easiest and unquestionably legal. The goal is to simply make it so the automated plate scanner fails to identify you plate and by massively overexposing one area so the rest is massively underexposed seems the easiest. The trick is to put out enough power in a large enough area to do it. I want a large area but that large area needs to be really bright so the camera automatically tries to correctly balance the picture. It isn't like 200 watts is a large portion of power the vehicle puts out of it's 100+ kilowatt engine.
I have thought of building an LED license plate frame to mess with the cameras and others have tinkered with the idea some. The results at best could be considered hit or miss but that doesn't mean it couldn't be improved upon since most I have seen only output a few watts of power. I have been trying to figure out if I could build one with a power draw of 100-200W using some high output IR LEDs (the new license plates Minnesota uses are designed to be highly viable in the IR spectrum). Having a frame that isn't covering the license plate at all is perfectly legal in Minnesota but other things are not Minnesota statute 169.79 Subd. 7. Also the existing laws on vehicle illumination would also not prohibit this.
By frame I mean many concentric rings of LEDs packed tightly around the license plate so that you have 100 watts of IR LEDs shining around each plate. One of these days I will get some time to do it, and may also look into illuminating the front and rear windshield with IR LEDs as well in a similar fashion to further flood the image with IR.
What always bothered me about that situation and I could never find an answer to is the laws about leaving property on public land in Nevada. In Minnesota, my state, there are very specific rules about leaving personal property on public land so after 14 days it becomes abandoned property and anyone can take it legally. This is why you hear about people who have their tree stands stolen that they put up weeks before hand but then state that when the reported the incident the police didn't do anything. I have wondered if there was a similar law in in Nevada because if so it would make it so anyone could have claimed his cattle and I bet some other rancher wouldn't have minded getting some free head of cattle to bolster their own herds.
In my house similar situations happen rather frequently. Just replace MS office with some large GIS data set, or linux distro I want to try on some other box. Having Netflix and Hulu or YouTube running at the same time is is fairly common too.
I was under the impression that the only things that people have made that will show that there was intelligent life on this planet in millions of years would be the giant bronze propellers on our largest ships. Not sure about their longevity over a billion years but I have heard estimates that they will last a few million.
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Even an ideal lens becomes diffraction limited at which point 2 things start to happen on the sensor and film. The first one is what is known as false magnification where the smallest feature the lens is capable of resolving is larger than the pixel size. So in this case extra pixels aren't adding anything to the image quality and the only real difference between those adjacent pixels would be the noise in the sensor. This also creates a sort of soft focus, and while you have this huge image there isn't that much information actually there. False magnification happens more often at lower f stops with lower quality lenses and smaller sensors but even is a concern with high quality lenses with full size sensors at higher f stops. Also with diffraction limited images you have the diffraction interference pattern that further degrades your image and leads to loss of detail. Both of these types artifacts are things you are not going to be able to deal with in post processing unless you have a special camera with more advanced optics specifically designed to be used in diffraction limited situations and even then it takes a lot of post processing.
If you want to find out more here is as good article on the subject and be sure to go down to the what it looks like section to see what happens at higher f stops on a higher end camera. Way back in the old days I was taught how to avoid these problems by not shooting at anything higher than f/8 with 100 speed black and white film. Granted that was with a 55mm F/2.8 lens (I think that is what it was) on a Pentax K1000 in high school but that rule still holds today. Granted there were times when you would want to shoot at an f stop higher than 8 but you knew and understood why you were doing that. I still like taking waterfall pictures using a really high f stop with the long exposure but there even though the image is diffraction limited the image really doesn't have a sharp focus anyways because of the mist plus it gives a bit more of an ethereal feel with the soft focus.
I see it in a similar way. Film photography is now like painting something that people do for the artistic quality of the medium. I just wish I could have found the lenses I don't have for my camera (17mm fisheye and 400+mm telephoto) before prices went way up. I still use my very reliable Spotmatic F I got 20 years ago and it has been on almost every continent (haven't made it to Antarctica) and has worked wonderfully.
I just got my pictures back from the camera shop from when I went to Madrid last month. They do a fairly brisk business catering to the film photographer even if the vast majority of their business is on the digital side now. The only down sides I have noticed is that the selection of films has gone down, I miss the old kodachrome and velvia film, prices have gone up, and that I can't go to a mass market retailer when I need film so I have to be sure to have enough on hand. Film photography is not basically where painting is now something that people to for artistic reasons.
I have shot some friends and relatives weddings as a favor for free (It was my wedding gift to them) and even then I spend more than a day. When I did that I would end up spending more than $100 on film and processing, granted I would be using high end film and would shoot 300-500 pictures over the course of the day. Even then the general flow was go to the rehearsal to plan some things and find out what pictures they would like, take pictures all day before during and after the wedding, get the film developed, then sit-down and go through the images find out what ones they really liked, scan the film and touch them up and provide a few DVDs with the images they really like. The lucky couple would then get all of the images, negatives, and digital copies that I touched up so they could make their own. Then again a good SLR body with really good lenses, triggered flashes with reflectors and all the other goodies most amateurs don't have so it was more like a real pro doing it but I just like photography and don't need it as a job.
I had forgotten about Holgas. I have never used one but I imagine their image quality would be on par with those old Kodak Pocket folders that can be gotten on the cheap in pretty good condition. Yes I have an old foldie and it is fun to mess around with from time to time but for overall image quality I'll keep my Spotmatic F and good set of lenses.
Keep in mind that on the low end you can have all the noise reduction you want but it won't overcome the false magnification you get with these small sensors with high pixel counts. Noise reduction here may actually make things worse
Since you stated everything else being the same I still might go for the 16mp one depending on sensor size. On the low end with small sensors that have high pixel counts they have probably already crossed over where having more pixels doesn't offers a better image. At some point the image becomes diffraction limited and the cheap lenses only make that happen sooner. Even on full size sensors in most DSLRs it wouldn't surprise me if some of them were diffraction limited at some higher f stops now.
Depends on who you are talking to. Me not hard to do, one of my friend's gun nut father, maybe.
In the US those flex fuel vehicles are not optimized but a bag of compromises since they are designed to run on everything from E0 (regular unleaded) up to E85 and any combination in between. Also running on E85 isn't going to net you reasonable mileage given the low energy density by fuel volume unless you are running huge compression numbers which since it is a flex fuel vehicle and will probably run on regular 87 octane it seems unlikely this is the case. The lighter alcohol fuels are great at producing power but don't expect good mileage which is what I was trying to get at in the original post.
Hey not all globalization is bad. I personally like German cars, Swiss mechanical watch movement, French cheese and digestifs, Indian silk rugs, British TV, Swedish tools, Japanese and Korean electronics, Dutch toys, large Nepali knives, and Canadian winter boots. What I don't like is the race to the bottom type of globalization that seems to be happening with cheap crap products made to increase profits and would prefer globalization where it is a race to the top in quality.
I don't like what I have seen with the quality going down on what once were great things because someone thought they could save a few cents per item by shipping manufacturing overseas. For example when I looked at small wire feed welders there were a bunch of highly questionable cut every corner ones around the $100 price point and in researching them they might work out of the box for some definitions of work and would likely fail in fairly short order all of which were made in China. From there to the one I got there was nothing but I ended up getting the smallest Hobart that while they cut corners (no thermal switch for the fan so it run all the time and the gas kit was separate but could be added if you didn't want to use flux core wire) it cost ~$270 on sale but came with a great warranty, was made in the US, is heavy as hell, and worked out of the box flawlessly for years.
E85 lacks basic energy, not to mention the hideous cost of manufacturing.
E85 is less energy dense per unit volume of fuel than gasoline, but for a given amount of air you can liberate more energy with E85 than with gasoline. Also E85 has a much higher octane rating than gasoline so you can run higher boost or higher compression. Higher boost allows you to liberate more energy per combustion cycle while higher compression just increased your Carnot Cycle efficiency making better use of the energy you liberated. Either way producing power with alcohol fuels isn't a problem, only the crappy implementation of consumer flex fuel vehicles that are a crappy compromise so they run sub optimally all of the time (maybe they actually run really good if you can get an E42 mix).
Fuel from field corn sucks, but there are better cheaper ways of producing alcohol fuels, like starting with methane and converting it to methanol or working up to heavier alcohols like ethanol, proponol, or butanol. Butanol should be what is pursued as it can be used as a direct gasoline replacement in existing vehicles with very similar properties and energy densities. It also doesn't absorb as much water as ethanol and better mixes with gasoline.
Hey we can't have any of that sensible talk around here. [/sarcasm] That is one thing I never understood is why a manufacturer just doesn't go fuck it and make a vehicle optimized for E85 and put E85 stickers on it instead of the unleaded fuel only ones now used. Yes it will probably get worse fuel economy (never ran the calculations) when properly optimized but as you pointed out ethanol (including E85) and methanol have some wonderful properties for performance. The 2 biggest are the phenomenal octane rating (high boost or high compression applications), plus another that is over looked in so many discussions, the ability to release more energy for a given volume of air (bad mileage but great power). This is why my project car will be converted to a supercharged alcohol burner. It is old enough that there are no real emission requirements applicable to it so I don't have to worry on that end either.
I do agree that making fuel from field corn was a stupid idea but hey it was a giant give away to the corn industry at the time which wasn't doing all that well (mid to late 90s). Even if we were to decide to use productive fields for growing fuel there are better crops but they don't have a big lobby like corn does. How often to you hear about the sugar cane lobby or the sugar beet lobby, both of whom are small parts of the sugar lobby that also happens to include corn. Either of those produces substantially more fuel per acre than corn but don't get as big of subsidies for growing, or conversion.
Careful with that. Remember you can always catch here on the long way around.
But that isn't vertical construction. Anyone can make a big pile of stuff and I am pretty sure my kids have made a bigger pile of their things.
Yes I get the reference, and yes I am sarcastic.
Not entirely true. I wondered what happens if you had 2 small neutron stars that collide and I guess they create all sorts of useful things if their combined mass is low enough to not become a black hole. Agreed that if there was just one sitting there it basically does nothing but get some collisions of neutron stars and you get gold. Also when talking about big monsters producing heavy elements you would need something bigger and hotter than Betelgeuse, like a Population III star which are thought to have been fairly common in the early universe and while they are large and when they blow are big enough to destroy their own core and don't create a black hole. So for heavy elements in the early universe these large fast burning monsters might have been able to produce enough. Then again IANAAP (I am not an astro physicist) so I may just be jumping to incorrect conclusions from partial information.
True but the whole purpose of this is to be complaint with the law. No part of the plate would be physically covered by the frame. The Minnesota law clearly states that it has to be a physical covering which this is neither physical nor covering.
I would be very wary of strobing the lights for a number of reasons. the first is that depending on the frequency it may violate laws in my state (60-120 Hz). Second, strobing IR is also used to trigger the lights for emergency vehicles and people have gotten in trouble for that and that seems like a great way to cause all sorts of unintended problems. Finally if you wanted to mess with the cameras you would need to be fairly exact in you timing.
That said having one be photo triggered would be doable but requires additional electronics. So given all that simply having a very bright ring around a substantially darker area would seem to be the easiest and unquestionably legal. The goal is to simply make it so the automated plate scanner fails to identify you plate and by massively overexposing one area so the rest is massively underexposed seems the easiest. The trick is to put out enough power in a large enough area to do it. I want a large area but that large area needs to be really bright so the camera automatically tries to correctly balance the picture. It isn't like 200 watts is a large portion of power the vehicle puts out of it's 100+ kilowatt engine.
Looks like the problem may just be not enough power.
They just stick them on police cars in my state.
I have thought of building an LED license plate frame to mess with the cameras and others have tinkered with the idea some. The results at best could be considered hit or miss but that doesn't mean it couldn't be improved upon since most I have seen only output a few watts of power. I have been trying to figure out if I could build one with a power draw of 100-200W using some high output IR LEDs (the new license plates Minnesota uses are designed to be highly viable in the IR spectrum). Having a frame that isn't covering the license plate at all is perfectly legal in Minnesota but other things are not Minnesota statute 169.79 Subd. 7. Also the existing laws on vehicle illumination would also not prohibit this.
By frame I mean many concentric rings of LEDs packed tightly around the license plate so that you have 100 watts of IR LEDs shining around each plate. One of these days I will get some time to do it, and may also look into illuminating the front and rear windshield with IR LEDs as well in a similar fashion to further flood the image with IR.
What always bothered me about that situation and I could never find an answer to is the laws about leaving property on public land in Nevada. In Minnesota, my state, there are very specific rules about leaving personal property on public land so after 14 days it becomes abandoned property and anyone can take it legally. This is why you hear about people who have their tree stands stolen that they put up weeks before hand but then state that when the reported the incident the police didn't do anything. I have wondered if there was a similar law in in Nevada because if so it would make it so anyone could have claimed his cattle and I bet some other rancher wouldn't have minded getting some free head of cattle to bolster their own herds.
In my house similar situations happen rather frequently. Just replace MS office with some large GIS data set, or linux distro I want to try on some other box. Having Netflix and Hulu or YouTube running at the same time is is fairly common too.
Well it did happen in Minneapolis, MN. I believe that the guy who shot back even won his lawsuit even if it took a few years.
I was under the impression that the only things that people have made that will show that there was intelligent life on this planet in millions of years would be the giant bronze propellers on our largest ships. Not sure about their longevity over a billion years but I have heard estimates that they will last a few million.
Those are just hood ornaments.