Old digital backs are still for sale on the market because they have no moving parts to fail. They work great.
Some of them have to be tethered to a computer.
Pretty soon there will be a good surplus of used 22MP backs on the market for about the price of a 1DS MKIII ($8000). I think the mamiya ZD is trading at $10k, brand new, with lens and camera body included.
They are called scanning backs because that is precisely what they do.
And yes, the resolution is unparalleled. 50 megapixels was achieved in these, oh maybe 10 years ago. Its not uncommon today for these to generate files in excess of 1GB.
This post will probably never get read as its over a week old, but I felt I should reply...
I am a professional photographer. I don't work in the family portrait business, I work in the commercial and editorial side. I pretty much do exactly as you request - I deliver high resolution files on CD.
You raise an interesting issue that many in the family portrait business are struggling to come to terms with. Essentially what the model has been - low entry price to get people in, let them order a few prints, if they want more prints they can come back at a later time when they have more money to spend on them. Remember, these are guys catering to families with small budgets, not large corporations with millions for marketing. Many ordinary folks would be set aback by an upfront cost of $350-$500 (which is what a full-time photographer really needs to make per job to stay afloat at a minimum)
The possibility of making ones own reprints has somewhat sidestepped this model. Now, a photographer's prints are usually (hopefully) of higher quality than what one could have printed himself or at by an automated machine at walmart, but the average joe won't know the difference...except that the walmart picture cost $1 and the photographer's cost $10.
Many of these photographers will sell digital files these days, but you can expect to pay a hefty cost up front for them - basically the cost of the potential loss of print business, probably $200 or $300, or more. Try looking for a younger person... they typically "get it" and its the guys who've been doing it this way for many years that have the problem changing things.
In the commercial world this is standard operating procedure, and a shoot costs at a minimum, several hundred to a few thousand dollars.
In order to really preserve digital data for long periods of time, you have to include some kind of rosetta stone that describes what machinery to use to read the data, and how to interpret it as it is read.
You make the mistake of assuming that someone will be around and have the presence of mind to copy it.
This is why they say that preserving digital is more expensive - you have to make frequent copies of it as time and technology marches on. You cannot simply put it in a climate controlled box, store it, and expect it to be readable in 100 years.
i'm a photographer and this comes up in my day to day life...
digital is easier for storage in the short term, negatives take up far more physical space and the threat of catastrophic physical damage from flood or fire is very real.
but in the long term, negatives have a better chance of survival due to the fact that you can simply hold it up to a light to read the information. If I died today, in 100 years the images stored on my harddrives and DVDs would simply be lost, or at the very least, uneconomical to recover. A properly stored negative will still be around, and while perhaps not in perfect condition, it will still be readable with a very simple device - your eye, and a lightbulb.
But in 1000 years, what machine will be able to read the DVD?
The problem isn't necessarily the medium of storage itself, its the whole of how the information is encoded. After awhile, the machinery and knowledge of the format will be lost.
With normal film, hold it up to a light, the image is there. Suppose that in 200 years someone wants to play back the film - even if such a machine did not exist, it would be easy to construct.
I recall reading a similar problem nasa ran into... they wanted to resurrect some data from very early rocket launches and move it to a new medium for historical preservation. The data was recorded onto a magnetic tape by an early computer, however all the machines that could read the tapes were long gone. Eventually they found a non-working machine in the basement of the smithsonian, and brought a couple guys in their 80s out of retirement to fix and run the thing. They were the only ones who remembered how it worked and how the data was structured.
We run into the same problem today with digital file formats and storage media. Even if the DVD survives hundreds of years... there won't be any working machines to play it, and nobody will be around who understands the format and how to turn it from microscopic divots into meaningful information.... unless we figure something out.
Actually electric motors are just far more torquey than IC engines are.
It will not be unusual for 0-60 in 4 second times on modest vehicles that are electric powered. The difficult part is range.
In fact, I would not be surprised if future electric vehicles are electronically limited in their torque production, as a matter of safety. People will launch themselves too far too fast...
That is only if you live in a state where emission regulations are poor/non-existant.
In states with regulations, trucks are now required to install filters that have nearly eliminated the belching truck.
Further refinements in diesel technology (cleaner fuel and improved emissions control) will have diesel vehicles as clean as their gas counterparts within a couple of years.
Interestingly, Europe's vehicle emissions regulations are generally not as strict as many US states are.
it's bad that it may not accurately reflect the real life experiences that full electric drivers will experience.
I guess this is true if your daily commute consists of driving around a parking lot at 15 mph for hours, as thats the common threshold for "all electric"...
Your Omni probably weighed half as much as a common car does today, as safety standards now require much stronger frames and accesories, and has performance that would be unacceptable and unsafe by today's standards.
Sure, you could put a motor in a cardboard box and get great mileage. Doesn't mean it'd be good to drive.
electricity is about a third the speed of light and is now one of the big bottlenecks in high performance computing.
ie, one of the reasons the cache on a processor is so much faster than going out to ram is that it is physically nearby. processors today move fast enough that several cycles idle while just waiting for ram to return data through the winding conductor path.
It takes an enormous amount of gas inside of a house to actually explode it and a great deal of time to accumulate. The smell would be overpowering. Completely overwhelming. This is why the few house explosions that do happen are usually in abandoned buildings, or when nobody has been around for awhile.
Further making it rare is that natural gas is actually fairly difficult to detonate, requiring a specific air/fuel ratio of 5-15%. That is alot of gas. A small leak won't do it - the gas will disipate too quickly. You need a good sized leak. Now the few times I've been around a real gas leak, let me tell you, you can *hear* it. It is extremely piercing loud from the pressure of the gas forcing through the leak.
Most people with their functional wits about them won't be anywhere near a gas line that could injure them for these very reasons.
I'm guessing it won't be long before the human up front spends most of their time reading magazines.
Essentially it is that way now. Autopilot systems exist for take off, flight and landing. Taxi is about the only thing not automated so far and it would not be difficult for that either and has been proposed.
pilots are still needed to handle emergency situations. difficult landing conditions are often passed to the autopilot though because of its faster response time. really, really difficult landing conditions (such as near crash landings) still fall to the human.
Unless your water is over $.30 / gallon, this system isn't more cost effective.
Many (most?) tall buildings have water storage systems on their upper floors or roof. They are filled by pumping up from municipal at night, when energy rates are lowest. This doesn't result in a $.30 / gallon cost.
If the rest of the world wants to base its opinion on falsities and ignorance, then the rest of the world can simply, go to hell. Same's true for americans who want to believe simplistic non-truths about others' cultures.
And from the looks of it, the rest of the world is well on its way there, with or without USA influence.
the reason the crew module was on top of those was so if needed, it could be ejected (the very top of the stack was an ejection booster). Also, they were using rocket designs based on ICBMs which obviously had their payload in the nose. Heck, gemini missions were launched on the very icbm's that also carried nuclear warheads.
early shuttle designs actually did have the shuttle on top of the nose of the launch rocket. i'm not sure the reason for the change, but i do believe the shuttle on those designs was quite a bit smaller in size.
I'd imagine trying to stick something like the shuttle on top of such a rocket makes flight difficult though for aerodynamic reasons. Also - think of the facilities you would need to handle a heavy lift rocket *AND* a 120 foot shuttle on top of that! the VAB wouldn't be tall enough and you'd need massively uprated crawler transport.
i'm sure someone with more knowledge about that part of the design can chime in...
The shuttle is stronger than nearly any plane on earth. However, the velocities, energy and stresses involved are far greater than any plane on earth faces.
A 1.5 lb chunk of foam travelling at >500 mph generates at least 10,000 lbs of force/sq ft when it impacts. There are not many materials that can survive that and still be light enough to fly into space with a decent sized cargo. At least, not at a reasonable cost (and many think the shuttle's cost is unreasonable as it is). It is simply a hazard of space travel - our ability to propel exceeds our ability to deflect.
In space, things are even worse. There are nuts and bolts, paint chips and various debris flying around in orbit at thousands of miles an hour. It is a miracle nothing has been destroyed yet by them.
Then I splurged, and bought a 32! It cost $50. Today, $50 will get you a gigabyte.
My camera today cannot even store 1 picture on a 16 megabyte card.
If this technology accelerates anywhere near the pace of flash (and considering the usefulness of it in all kinds of fields, it may), we'll all be using mram or similar in a few years and look back at DRAM as those quaint old days, much like using floppies...
they are ordinary engined ships, with sails attached. You can still make the runs in the same amount of time, but use the sail when the winds are favorable, and power back the engines, thus saving fuel.
Fuel costs are enormous expenses in running a ship. 3 million dollars? The fuel savings would pay for it in little time on a large cargo or tanker ship.
The problem with adding traditional sails to powered ships is they reduce cargo capacity and ease of access to said cargo for load/unload. These sails are tethered and fold up easily, requiring minimal storage and don't change cargo access.
These days CMOS sensors have made great strides in quality due to 2 things: microlenses, and on-chip noise reduction.
CMOS sensors used to be pretty crude because the photon-buckets were small and far apart because the chip circuitry had to be placed between pixels. Small buckets made for lots of noise and poor sensitivity. Microlenses solved sensitivity issues by allowing focusing light from a wider area onto the bucket, and on-chip noise reduction removes much of the noise at the chip level. CMOS was once promised to be cheap and plentiful because it was based on existing microchip manufacturing technology - but the need to add things like microlenses has made the manufacturing nearly as expensive as CCD.
CCD is more common in very high end applications like astronomy and medium format digital. The quality argument is alot like those arguments between audiophiles - very few people can tell the difference and it has more to do with the after-capture processing rather than what type of chip captured the image.
Indeed nowadays the decision to use CCD or CMOS is more electrical design than anything. What works best with a company's existing product facilities and what previous components in stock they can re-use...
tungsten isnt close at all to sunlight. If you've noticed those newer "natural" light lightbulbs you get are just tungsten with a blue filter on it to cool the color temp down.
theres also many types of fluorescent bulbs. the film industry uses daylight balanced fluorescent quite a bit now because you can have a continuous light source without all the extra heat generated by the incadescents.
in any case, regardless of what the color spectrum is, it is easy to color filter a brilliant white light.
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Old digital backs are still for sale on the market because they have no moving parts to fail. They work great.
Some of them have to be tethered to a computer.
Pretty soon there will be a good surplus of used 22MP backs on the market for about the price of a 1DS MKIII ($8000). I think the mamiya ZD is trading at $10k, brand new, with lens and camera body included.
They are called scanning backs because that is precisely what they do.
And yes, the resolution is unparalleled. 50 megapixels was achieved in these, oh maybe 10 years ago. Its not uncommon today for these to generate files in excess of 1GB.
This post will probably never get read as its over a week old, but I felt I should reply...
I am a professional photographer. I don't work in the family portrait business, I work in the commercial and editorial side. I pretty much do exactly as you request - I deliver high resolution files on CD.
You raise an interesting issue that many in the family portrait business are struggling to come to terms with. Essentially what the model has been - low entry price to get people in, let them order a few prints, if they want more prints they can come back at a later time when they have more money to spend on them. Remember, these are guys catering to families with small budgets, not large corporations with millions for marketing. Many ordinary folks would be set aback by an upfront cost of $350-$500 (which is what a full-time photographer really needs to make per job to stay afloat at a minimum)
The possibility of making ones own reprints has somewhat sidestepped this model. Now, a photographer's prints are usually (hopefully) of higher quality than what one could have printed himself or at by an automated machine at walmart, but the average joe won't know the difference...except that the walmart picture cost $1 and the photographer's cost $10.
Many of these photographers will sell digital files these days, but you can expect to pay a hefty cost up front for them - basically the cost of the potential loss of print business, probably $200 or $300, or more. Try looking for a younger person... they typically "get it" and its the guys who've been doing it this way for many years that have the problem changing things.
In the commercial world this is standard operating procedure, and a shoot costs at a minimum, several hundred to a few thousand dollars.
In order to really preserve digital data for long periods of time, you have to include some kind of rosetta stone that describes what machinery to use to read the data, and how to interpret it as it is read.
You make the mistake of assuming that someone will be around and have the presence of mind to copy it.
This is why they say that preserving digital is more expensive - you have to make frequent copies of it as time and technology marches on. You cannot simply put it in a climate controlled box, store it, and expect it to be readable in 100 years.
i'm a photographer and this comes up in my day to day life...
digital is easier for storage in the short term, negatives take up far more physical space and the threat of catastrophic physical damage from flood or fire is very real.
but in the long term, negatives have a better chance of survival due to the fact that you can simply hold it up to a light to read the information. If I died today, in 100 years the images stored on my harddrives and DVDs would simply be lost, or at the very least, uneconomical to recover. A properly stored negative will still be around, and while perhaps not in perfect condition, it will still be readable with a very simple device - your eye, and a lightbulb.
But in 1000 years, what machine will be able to read the DVD?
The problem isn't necessarily the medium of storage itself, its the whole of how the information is encoded. After awhile, the machinery and knowledge of the format will be lost.
With normal film, hold it up to a light, the image is there. Suppose that in 200 years someone wants to play back the film - even if such a machine did not exist, it would be easy to construct.
I recall reading a similar problem nasa ran into... they wanted to resurrect some data from very early rocket launches and move it to a new medium for historical preservation. The data was recorded onto a magnetic tape by an early computer, however all the machines that could read the tapes were long gone. Eventually they found a non-working machine in the basement of the smithsonian, and brought a couple guys in their 80s out of retirement to fix and run the thing. They were the only ones who remembered how it worked and how the data was structured.
We run into the same problem today with digital file formats and storage media. Even if the DVD survives hundreds of years... there won't be any working machines to play it, and nobody will be around who understands the format and how to turn it from microscopic divots into meaningful information.... unless we figure something out.
Actually electric motors are just far more torquey than IC engines are.
It will not be unusual for 0-60 in 4 second times on modest vehicles that are electric powered. The difficult part is range.
In fact, I would not be surprised if future electric vehicles are electronically limited in their torque production, as a matter of safety. People will launch themselves too far too fast...
That is only if you live in a state where emission regulations are poor/non-existant.
In states with regulations, trucks are now required to install filters that have nearly eliminated the belching truck.
Further refinements in diesel technology (cleaner fuel and improved emissions control) will have diesel vehicles as clean as their gas counterparts within a couple of years.
Interestingly, Europe's vehicle emissions regulations are generally not as strict as many US states are.
it's bad that it may not accurately reflect the real life experiences that full electric drivers will experience.
I guess this is true if your daily commute consists of driving around a parking lot at 15 mph for hours, as thats the common threshold for "all electric"...
Your Omni probably weighed half as much as a common car does today, as safety standards now require much stronger frames and accesories, and has performance that would be unacceptable and unsafe by today's standards.
Sure, you could put a motor in a cardboard box and get great mileage. Doesn't mean it'd be good to drive.
why post at all? the article is about how the EPA updated the standards for the first time in 30 years.
RTFA indeed.
electricity is about a third the speed of light and is now one of the big bottlenecks in high performance computing.
ie, one of the reasons the cache on a processor is so much faster than going out to ram is that it is physically nearby. processors today move fast enough that several cycles idle while just waiting for ram to return data through the winding conductor path.
It takes an enormous amount of gas inside of a house to actually explode it and a great deal of time to accumulate. The smell would be overpowering. Completely overwhelming. This is why the few house explosions that do happen are usually in abandoned buildings, or when nobody has been around for awhile.
Further making it rare is that natural gas is actually fairly difficult to detonate, requiring a specific air/fuel ratio of 5-15%. That is alot of gas. A small leak won't do it - the gas will disipate too quickly. You need a good sized leak. Now the few times I've been around a real gas leak, let me tell you, you can *hear* it. It is extremely piercing loud from the pressure of the gas forcing through the leak.
Most people with their functional wits about them won't be anywhere near a gas line that could injure them for these very reasons.
I'm guessing it won't be long before the human up front spends most of their time reading magazines.
Essentially it is that way now. Autopilot systems exist for take off, flight and landing. Taxi is about the only thing not automated so far and it would not be difficult for that either and has been proposed.
pilots are still needed to handle emergency situations. difficult landing conditions are often passed to the autopilot though because of its faster response time. really, really difficult landing conditions (such as near crash landings) still fall to the human.
Unless your water is over $.30 / gallon, this system isn't more cost effective.
Many (most?) tall buildings have water storage systems on their upper floors or roof. They are filled by pumping up from municipal at night, when energy rates are lowest. This doesn't result in a $.30 / gallon cost.
If the rest of the world wants to base its opinion on falsities and ignorance, then the rest of the world can simply, go to hell. Same's true for americans who want to believe simplistic non-truths about others' cultures.
And from the looks of it, the rest of the world is well on its way there, with or without USA influence.
The tiles are reused between missions and eventually replaced.
The heating on them isn't uniform though (its like those thermal simulation graphics you see) so some have to be replaced before others do.
the reason the crew module was on top of those was so if needed, it could be ejected (the very top of the stack was an ejection booster). Also, they were using rocket designs based on ICBMs which obviously had their payload in the nose. Heck, gemini missions were launched on the very icbm's that also carried nuclear warheads.
early shuttle designs actually did have the shuttle on top of the nose of the launch rocket. i'm not sure the reason for the change, but i do believe the shuttle on those designs was quite a bit smaller in size.
I'd imagine trying to stick something like the shuttle on top of such a rocket makes flight difficult though for aerodynamic reasons. Also - think of the facilities you would need to handle a heavy lift rocket *AND* a 120 foot shuttle on top of that! the VAB wouldn't be tall enough and you'd need massively uprated crawler transport.
i'm sure someone with more knowledge about that part of the design can chime in...
The shuttle is stronger than nearly any plane on earth. However, the velocities, energy and stresses involved are far greater than any plane on earth faces.
A 1.5 lb chunk of foam travelling at >500 mph generates at least 10,000 lbs of force/sq ft when it impacts. There are not many materials that can survive that and still be light enough to fly into space with a decent sized cargo. At least, not at a reasonable cost (and many think the shuttle's cost is unreasonable as it is). It is simply a hazard of space travel - our ability to propel exceeds our ability to deflect.
In space, things are even worse. There are nuts and bolts, paint chips and various debris flying around in orbit at thousands of miles an hour. It is a miracle nothing has been destroyed yet by them.
Then I splurged, and bought a 32! It cost $50. Today, $50 will get you a gigabyte.
My camera today cannot even store 1 picture on a 16 megabyte card.
If this technology accelerates anywhere near the pace of flash (and considering the usefulness of it in all kinds of fields, it may), we'll all be using mram or similar in a few years and look back at DRAM as those quaint old days, much like using floppies...
they are ordinary engined ships, with sails attached. You can still make the runs in the same amount of time, but use the sail when the winds are favorable, and power back the engines, thus saving fuel.
Fuel costs are enormous expenses in running a ship. 3 million dollars? The fuel savings would pay for it in little time on a large cargo or tanker ship.
The problem with adding traditional sails to powered ships is they reduce cargo capacity and ease of access to said cargo for load/unload. These sails are tethered and fold up easily, requiring minimal storage and don't change cargo access.
it's actually a great leap forward to have that much sensitivity.
These days CMOS sensors have made great strides in quality due to 2 things: microlenses, and on-chip noise reduction.
CMOS sensors used to be pretty crude because the photon-buckets were small and far apart because the chip circuitry had to be placed between pixels. Small buckets made for lots of noise and poor sensitivity. Microlenses solved sensitivity issues by allowing focusing light from a wider area onto the bucket, and on-chip noise reduction removes much of the noise at the chip level. CMOS was once promised to be cheap and plentiful because it was based on existing microchip manufacturing technology - but the need to add things like microlenses has made the manufacturing nearly as expensive as CCD.
CCD is more common in very high end applications like astronomy and medium format digital. The quality argument is alot like those arguments between audiophiles - very few people can tell the difference and it has more to do with the after-capture processing rather than what type of chip captured the image.
Indeed nowadays the decision to use CCD or CMOS is more electrical design than anything. What works best with a company's existing product facilities and what previous components in stock they can re-use...
tungsten isnt close at all to sunlight. If you've noticed those newer "natural" light lightbulbs you get are just tungsten with a blue filter on it to cool the color temp down.
theres also many types of fluorescent bulbs. the film industry uses daylight balanced fluorescent quite a bit now because you can have a continuous light source without all the extra heat generated by the incadescents.
in any case, regardless of what the color spectrum is, it is easy to color filter a brilliant white light.