I completley agree and didn't mean to imply that good film would show grain at 2700DPI. More that cheap film showed a lot of grain at 2700DPI. Just to put things into perspective. That's all I intended. Thanks for adding your own perspective. I've known that good film has film grain that a 4000DPI scanner may or may not pick up. I'm glad you noted that. It's a good point to make.
I'm so glad I'm done scanning all of my film. Digital from here on out. What a project that was. Over 1200 Archival Gold CDs sitting in file cabinets....
Of course... if we can afford it.. you know that the agencies are going to pay for something better for reasons that are beyond our current understanding.
Surfing shots? No kidding. I spent an entire summer shooting my wife surfing while I was out of commission due to a surgery.
I completely understand your reason for shooting RAW. I used to feel the same way until I understood that no printer, video card, or display that I'll ever own has the color depth to display more than 8 bit color channels. If you're manipulating the image.. absolutely shoot in RAW. I couldn't agree more with this decision. It almost feels like your reason for shooting RAW is the digital equivalent for film photographers that shoot exclusively slide film. That analogy just hit me. Would you feel it's accurate for your situation?
I'm well aware that there are numerous governments on Earth. The vast majority of which care a great deal to be accurate on the globe we call Earth. If you are a reasonably proficient English speaker or from a nation that has the technical capacity to reach the SlashDot website there is a very high likelihood that your government (singular) is one of the governments (plural) that is very very concerned with being highly precise when placing things on the Earth. If you are from any other nation that buildings road, buildings, or bridges, your government is only very interested in being very precise in placing things on the globe. Only a few governments/nations on this planet could care less... those.. are still in mud huts and probably most citizens do not have access to the Internet.
Still.. there is a chance you are one of rare few that live in one of these countries and are wealthy enough to afford a computer and Internet access and spend your free time on SlashDot. There must be like a total of 3 of you in the world. I apologize for being presumtuous in your case.
Thanks for being pedantic about governemnts of this planet. I thought we were talking about a technical discussion.. and not the merits of how I formed my sentences that as a collective were used as my singular post and point. Thank you much for being the pedantic prick.
If you do a lot of post processing you'll always want to work in RAW until you're done doing your work. That makes perfect sense to me. I've been working with digital images for about 8 years. For the first three years i was a die hard image tweaker (to throw out a bogus title). After the years I learned to see all of the tricks in digital photography and I started to hate them because I can see them so easily and quickly. So now I shoot the image right the first time and don't touch it at all. Meaning I shoot 10x what I intend to keep.:-)
I apologize if I wasn't clear in what aspects I compare digitals and film.
For the most part I shoot for fun and don't care too much about the nits. My Digital Rebel is good enough for me. Although any worse and I wouldn't dare touch it. Well.. it's not good enough for me in terms of film grain at high ISO, and the frame rate is pathetic.
I suspected that's how they implemented it. So if they threw a high resolution CCD at it, they could solve the film grain issue at higher speed. Thanks for the explanation.
For me.. when I compare 1600 speed on my digital to 1600 speed film I buy... the film is much better in terms of grain. You can just barely see it printed 3x5 with the film. With the digital, it almost ruins the picture even at 3x5 scales. It pretty much only looks good on the 2" screen on the back of the SLR itself. I spun off a bunch of great pictures of my brother playing with his new pooch, and I was playing with my new f/1.4 lens at high speed and large aperature. Just to make it completely motionless. The grain was so bad at 1600 that the pictures are complete garbage. My take... only shoot that speed on my camera unless it is absolutely required. Which is going to always be low light situations. Grr... with a film body it's easy.. just pick up expensive film when you need to shoot low light. With digital.. you're out one year and another $650.
As odd as this may sound.. but I don't care enough to shoot RAW. I know it's better, but JPEG is good enough for me. I know... I'm not a purist.
For the record, I would never stear anyone away from a Nikon digital SLR. They are very good. It just is my opinion that Canon is dominant in nearly all aspects of the photo market. Every review and personal comparison I've ever done, it seems Canon is either nearly tied for top, or way ahead. Of course, this is not a good situation for any of us. I hope Nikon and a few others like Minolta catch up and quickly.
I have the Digital Rebel original. You are probably right it is related to firmware. I have the most recent version. But at the end of the day when I compare my film scans to my digitals... I get my observations above.
So your point is that it's not necessarily the CCD to blame, but possibly software. Point well noted.
As another point of merit. I have found that Canon is by far the leader in this area. My wife's now nearing four year old Canon P&S takes better pictures than a lot of brand new P&S cameras with significanly higher resolutions. When I say better, on all of the same merits I discussed above comparing digital to film. Nikon is good.. but when I compared the Digital Rebel to the D70 before buying I noticed the Nikon had more aberations. I also noted more saturation artificats in the Digital Rebel so it was a hard call which I actually preferred. I choose the Canon becuase I already owned some good Canon glass.
I have the Digital Rebel original! Yah.. I know.. it's already outdated.:-(
A friend just bought the D30. I need to take some comparison shots to see how the performance has changed. Although... I'm fairly certain I do NOT want to see the results.;)
I have used a film scanner to scan all film I have ever shot in my life. I now use a Digital SLR for all of my photography. I can tell you a few things that I have observed. First, my film scanner has a scan resolution of 2700DPI. For a 35mm film frame, that is roughly 51MB for an uncompressed 16bit color channel frame. I believe in terms of megapixels it's just over 10Megapixels. One thing I noticed is even my 100 speed film has very observable film grain at this dot pitch. My Digital SLR has some distortion when I look at the raw high res image but it's not nearly the same. So my conclusion is that even older DSLRs CCDs have better grain resolution than traditional film. As a note, I used relatively cheap color film. More expensive, black and white, or slide film may be so much better than SLRs of today. I once thought of shooting all slide film for better color depth and resolution, but felt it was too much of a PITA to scan it all by hand.
Next note. The are odd color aberations with SLRs that I still see today that do not exist even in the crappiest of color film that I scanned. There's a look that all digitals have that a trained eye can see. I haven't received any shots taken from truly high end professional DSLRs to see if they have solved this problem but even D30s have it.
Final comment is regarding color depth, undersaturation, and over saturation. Since they are all related/same. Film is still by far superior in this regard. DSLRs still undersaturate long before standard color film. Oversaturation is still a problem. Look at the full res pixels of anything shiny. It stands out pretty bad. Skin tones have always been a huge problem. I have no clue why since skin tones are typically in the mid range. Color depth and saturation/undersaturation still has a lot of room for improvement with DSLRs.
So I guess all I really needed to say is that I've observed that grain seems to be mostly solved with DLSRs.. but none of the other issues have yet.
Oh yah.. film speed is another big one. When I crank up my DSLR to 1600ISO it really sucks. Much worse than 1600ISO film. Maybe this is where the film grain comment comes from?
That's not entirely true. I have an uncle that shoots large format and pays $50 a scan for images about this size. The CCD size in this article is about the same size as his large frame film. So it's really not out of the question. Although highly unlikely and rare need for sure. So in general I completely agree with you, but there are a sick few that would actually use it and be able to justify it for the work they do.
I don't expect to see anything remotely close to this in a large format camera any time soon. Although we might see it in frame cameras. Hmm... I totally see it showing up there. Although the CCD and resolution would need to get a lot large to support the needs for frame cameras. But it would probably be too expensive. Hmm.. nevermind.. already found one that exists: http://www.vexcel.com/products/photogram/ultracam/ index.html Guess the demand is there already.
The only thing I added that was different is that the process we described is a lot more movement than is currently done to expose a single frame. I'm not sure if the mechanism can do all of this quickly. The shutter is very quick in both directions and dontrolled very precisely. The other stuff.. I'm not sure.
Clearly the one rule that has changed that motivated the SLR designs we have today is the film (CCD in this case) cannot be touched by any light at all other than the exposure of the frame. This rule has changed since the CCD can be hit with light all of the time. Hmm.. there is another snag here. You can't hit the CCD with too bright of light. They can be damaged by too bright of light too frequently. Or at least some can. This would work for a small aperature, but not a big one. I wonder how P&S handle this? Guess the answer is out there and I just don't know enough about it.
There are a ton of Rebel hacks out there. It might be worth hitting the community for hacking the Rebel to see what control they have. I know they've made a lot of great improvements to annoyances. Unfortunately for me the annoyances of all Digital SLRs cannot be changed with firmware. What bugs me most with all Digital SLRs is from a user interface perspective they are high tech P&S cameras and not SLRs. I'd prefer to have the user controls optimized for manual control with deep menu options for automated "idiot modes" as I like to call them. It only makes sense to bury the automated modes in the menus because people set the mode they'll be using for a long time and leave them. Where people that like the full manual control want to keep the object framed and just twitch a few fingers to set the camera where it should be. The only *extra* I care about with my Digital Rebel that's anything beyond a pure manual is the HUD and built in meter display on the HUD.
Anyway... I'm digressing from the main thread here.
I agree completely. I was simply proposing a notional solution to the problem so the other poster would understand it isn't as simple with an SLR as it is with a P&S. Mostly because most *intuitive* solutions would render the SLR.. not an SLR at all.
I think you have a good idea. If I dare speak for Canon and Nikon (and others) the reason is probably very simple. They've been building SLRs for a very very long time using only a couple of mechanical solutions to the shutter and prism/mirrors. What you propose sounds very reasonable but technically more complicated than what they've been doing for a long time. I'd be shocked that their mechanical engineers aren't drooling over the opportunity to design a new mechanism and probably have already proposed many tentative solutions that aren't ready for prime time production. For whatever reason. The digital SLR product lines are just starting to take shape for consumers. I doubt many professionals would care for this new feature because they already know how to take great pictures without it. Thus why it's probably low priority for the time being.
As I think about it more... you're taking advantage of a cleaning feature. Will the mechanism work fast enough to close to bring the mirror down, close the shutter, then do the exposure which includes another open and close of the shutter, and then return the mirror back up and shutter open again for a single exposure? Seems like it could be brutal on the mechanism if it weren't designed for that. I'm not very familiar with SLR mechanisms beyond what we've already discussed.
Interesting suggestion. I might check some photography forums to see if anyone has talked about this.
What?! Laptops awesome performance. There are lots of gamers that use laptops and at work we use high performance laptops as our demo road show that are more powerful than our blade server clusters. What you smokin? The only performance dig we've ever measured are the hard disks. I think you are buying cheap laptops and expecting the performance of expensive workstations. Or are looking at the wrong laptops for your needs.
True...but if disk performance is your problem for that amount of data... why not use a portable drive? Laptops are powerful enough.. the only limitation is the disk performance.
Plus.. making the point that this isn't really portable is still valid. My SFF is a desktop just like anyone else's.. yet it's a lot lighter than this hybrid they are referring to. What's the purpose? I think the innovation is great, but it needs work.
Why are you so ornery? Is there something wrong with making valid points?
That's not a portable! My laptop is heavy at 8lbs and it sucks to carry around with all of the gadgets and gizmos. Heck... even my SFF is lighter than 20 pounds. I love the concept but the weight has to improve big time.
If there was such a thing, I don't believe it would be an SLR anymore.
The request is very common though. I wish I had it sometimes. Then again, when I use digital P&S cameras I find the display impossible to view in most bright light situations. I think I prefer the view finder for this reason.. or a combination of the two.
It does seem that they could create a new prism that splits to the view finder, CCD & shutter, and a third CCD for the screen. I wonder what additional aberations this would create?
What if the system is turned on and it starts hitting the security cameras? Seems like this could backfire.
I mean... seems like you have a great test case to know if you can rob a place. Try you cell phone camera, if it doesn't work you know the "Smile, you're on camera" sign is bogus.:-)
I'm merely trying to be clear on the facts. Why post CEfGW when you know it to be otherwise in this case?
It really doesn't matter. But for those that don't know.. the government does care about being very very close when it comes to the Earth. Much closer than anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
I completley agree and didn't mean to imply that good film would show grain at 2700DPI. More that cheap film showed a lot of grain at 2700DPI. Just to put things into perspective. That's all I intended. Thanks for adding your own perspective. I've known that good film has film grain that a 4000DPI scanner may or may not pick up. I'm glad you noted that. It's a good point to make.
I'm so glad I'm done scanning all of my film. Digital from here on out. What a project that was. Over 1200 Archival Gold CDs sitting in file cabinets....
That's pretty cool. Thanks for those bits.
Of course... if we can afford it.. you know that the agencies are going to pay for something better for reasons that are beyond our current understanding.
Surfing shots? No kidding. I spent an entire summer shooting my wife surfing while I was out of commission due to a surgery.
I completely understand your reason for shooting RAW. I used to feel the same way until I understood that no printer, video card, or display that I'll ever own has the color depth to display more than 8 bit color channels. If you're manipulating the image.. absolutely shoot in RAW. I couldn't agree more with this decision. It almost feels like your reason for shooting RAW is the digital equivalent for film photographers that shoot exclusively slide film. That analogy just hit me. Would you feel it's accurate for your situation?
I'm well aware that there are numerous governments on Earth. The vast majority of which care a great deal to be accurate on the globe we call Earth. If you are a reasonably proficient English speaker or from a nation that has the technical capacity to reach the SlashDot website there is a very high likelihood that your government (singular) is one of the governments (plural) that is very very concerned with being highly precise when placing things on the Earth. If you are from any other nation that buildings road, buildings, or bridges, your government is only very interested in being very precise in placing things on the globe. Only a few governments/nations on this planet could care less... those.. are still in mud huts and probably most citizens do not have access to the Internet.
Still.. there is a chance you are one of rare few that live in one of these countries and are wealthy enough to afford a computer and Internet access and spend your free time on SlashDot. There must be like a total of 3 of you in the world. I apologize for being presumtuous in your case.
Thanks for being pedantic about governemnts of this planet. I thought we were talking about a technical discussion.. and not the merits of how I formed my sentences that as a collective were used as my singular post and point. Thank you much for being the pedantic prick.
Minolta was bought by Sony? What a travesty.
:-)
If you do a lot of post processing you'll always want to work in RAW until you're done doing your work. That makes perfect sense to me. I've been working with digital images for about 8 years. For the first three years i was a die hard image tweaker (to throw out a bogus title). After the years I learned to see all of the tricks in digital photography and I started to hate them because I can see them so easily and quickly. So now I shoot the image right the first time and don't touch it at all. Meaning I shoot 10x what I intend to keep.
That's probably why JPEG doesn't bother me.
I apologize if I wasn't clear in what aspects I compare digitals and film.
For the most part I shoot for fun and don't care too much about the nits. My Digital Rebel is good enough for me. Although any worse and I wouldn't dare touch it. Well.. it's not good enough for me in terms of film grain at high ISO, and the frame rate is pathetic.
I suspected that's how they implemented it. So if they threw a high resolution CCD at it, they could solve the film grain issue at higher speed. Thanks for the explanation.
For me.. when I compare 1600 speed on my digital to 1600 speed film I buy... the film is much better in terms of grain. You can just barely see it printed 3x5 with the film. With the digital, it almost ruins the picture even at 3x5 scales. It pretty much only looks good on the 2" screen on the back of the SLR itself. I spun off a bunch of great pictures of my brother playing with his new pooch, and I was playing with my new f/1.4 lens at high speed and large aperature. Just to make it completely motionless. The grain was so bad at 1600 that the pictures are complete garbage. My take... only shoot that speed on my camera unless it is absolutely required. Which is going to always be low light situations. Grr... with a film body it's easy.. just pick up expensive film when you need to shoot low light. With digital.. you're out one year and another $650.
As odd as this may sound.. but I don't care enough to shoot RAW. I know it's better, but JPEG is good enough for me. I know... I'm not a purist.
For the record, I would never stear anyone away from a Nikon digital SLR. They are very good. It just is my opinion that Canon is dominant in nearly all aspects of the photo market. Every review and personal comparison I've ever done, it seems Canon is either nearly tied for top, or way ahead. Of course, this is not a good situation for any of us. I hope Nikon and a few others like Minolta catch up and quickly.
I find it better than film in terms of film grain only. In all other aspects I find film far superior.
I have the Digital Rebel original. You are probably right it is related to firmware. I have the most recent version. But at the end of the day when I compare my film scans to my digitals... I get my observations above.
So your point is that it's not necessarily the CCD to blame, but possibly software. Point well noted.
As another point of merit. I have found that Canon is by far the leader in this area. My wife's now nearing four year old Canon P&S takes better pictures than a lot of brand new P&S cameras with significanly higher resolutions. When I say better, on all of the same merits I discussed above comparing digital to film. Nikon is good.. but when I compared the Digital Rebel to the D70 before buying I noticed the Nikon had more aberations. I also noted more saturation artificats in the Digital Rebel so it was a hard call which I actually preferred. I choose the Canon becuase I already owned some good Canon glass.
I have the Digital Rebel original! Yah.. I know.. it's already outdated. :-(
;)
A friend just bought the D30. I need to take some comparison shots to see how the performance has changed. Although... I'm fairly certain I do NOT want to see the results.
I have used a film scanner to scan all film I have ever shot in my life. I now use a Digital SLR for all of my photography. I can tell you a few things that I have observed. First, my film scanner has a scan resolution of 2700DPI. For a 35mm film frame, that is roughly 51MB for an uncompressed 16bit color channel frame. I believe in terms of megapixels it's just over 10Megapixels. One thing I noticed is even my 100 speed film has very observable film grain at this dot pitch. My Digital SLR has some distortion when I look at the raw high res image but it's not nearly the same. So my conclusion is that even older DSLRs CCDs have better grain resolution than traditional film. As a note, I used relatively cheap color film. More expensive, black and white, or slide film may be so much better than SLRs of today. I once thought of shooting all slide film for better color depth and resolution, but felt it was too much of a PITA to scan it all by hand.
Next note. The are odd color aberations with SLRs that I still see today that do not exist even in the crappiest of color film that I scanned. There's a look that all digitals have that a trained eye can see. I haven't received any shots taken from truly high end professional DSLRs to see if they have solved this problem but even D30s have it.
Final comment is regarding color depth, undersaturation, and over saturation. Since they are all related/same. Film is still by far superior in this regard. DSLRs still undersaturate long before standard color film. Oversaturation is still a problem. Look at the full res pixels of anything shiny. It stands out pretty bad. Skin tones have always been a huge problem. I have no clue why since skin tones are typically in the mid range. Color depth and saturation/undersaturation still has a lot of room for improvement with DSLRs.
So I guess all I really needed to say is that I've observed that grain seems to be mostly solved with DLSRs.. but none of the other issues have yet.
Oh yah.. film speed is another big one. When I crank up my DSLR to 1600ISO it really sucks. Much worse than 1600ISO film. Maybe this is where the film grain comment comes from?
That's not entirely true. I have an uncle that shoots large format and pays $50 a scan for images about this size. The CCD size in this article is about the same size as his large frame film. So it's really not out of the question. Although highly unlikely and rare need for sure. So in general I completely agree with you, but there are a sick few that would actually use it and be able to justify it for the work they do.
/ index.html Guess the demand is there already.
I don't expect to see anything remotely close to this in a large format camera any time soon. Although we might see it in frame cameras. Hmm... I totally see it showing up there. Although the CCD and resolution would need to get a lot large to support the needs for frame cameras. But it would probably be too expensive. Hmm.. nevermind.. already found one that exists: http://www.vexcel.com/products/photogram/ultracam
We said the same thing. :-)
The only thing I added that was different is that the process we described is a lot more movement than is currently done to expose a single frame. I'm not sure if the mechanism can do all of this quickly. The shutter is very quick in both directions and dontrolled very precisely. The other stuff.. I'm not sure.
Clearly the one rule that has changed that motivated the SLR designs we have today is the film (CCD in this case) cannot be touched by any light at all other than the exposure of the frame. This rule has changed since the CCD can be hit with light all of the time. Hmm.. there is another snag here. You can't hit the CCD with too bright of light. They can be damaged by too bright of light too frequently. Or at least some can. This would work for a small aperature, but not a big one. I wonder how P&S handle this? Guess the answer is out there and I just don't know enough about it.
There are a ton of Rebel hacks out there. It might be worth hitting the community for hacking the Rebel to see what control they have. I know they've made a lot of great improvements to annoyances. Unfortunately for me the annoyances of all Digital SLRs cannot be changed with firmware. What bugs me most with all Digital SLRs is from a user interface perspective they are high tech P&S cameras and not SLRs. I'd prefer to have the user controls optimized for manual control with deep menu options for automated "idiot modes" as I like to call them. It only makes sense to bury the automated modes in the menus because people set the mode they'll be using for a long time and leave them. Where people that like the full manual control want to keep the object framed and just twitch a few fingers to set the camera where it should be. The only *extra* I care about with my Digital Rebel that's anything beyond a pure manual is the HUD and built in meter display on the HUD.
Anyway... I'm digressing from the main thread here.
I agree completely. I was simply proposing a notional solution to the problem so the other poster would understand it isn't as simple with an SLR as it is with a P&S. Mostly because most *intuitive* solutions would render the SLR.. not an SLR at all.
I think you have a good idea. If I dare speak for Canon and Nikon (and others) the reason is probably very simple. They've been building SLRs for a very very long time using only a couple of mechanical solutions to the shutter and prism/mirrors. What you propose sounds very reasonable but technically more complicated than what they've been doing for a long time. I'd be shocked that their mechanical engineers aren't drooling over the opportunity to design a new mechanism and probably have already proposed many tentative solutions that aren't ready for prime time production. For whatever reason. The digital SLR product lines are just starting to take shape for consumers. I doubt many professionals would care for this new feature because they already know how to take great pictures without it. Thus why it's probably low priority for the time being.
As I think about it more... you're taking advantage of a cleaning feature. Will the mechanism work fast enough to close to bring the mirror down, close the shutter, then do the exposure which includes another open and close of the shutter, and then return the mirror back up and shutter open again for a single exposure? Seems like it could be brutal on the mechanism if it weren't designed for that. I'm not very familiar with SLR mechanisms beyond what we've already discussed.
Interesting suggestion. I might check some photography forums to see if anyone has talked about this.
What?! Laptops awesome performance. There are lots of gamers that use laptops and at work we use high performance laptops as our demo road show that are more powerful than our blade server clusters. What you smokin? The only performance dig we've ever measured are the hard disks. I think you are buying cheap laptops and expecting the performance of expensive workstations. Or are looking at the wrong laptops for your needs.
I didn't think your post was funny... I think it's dead on!
True.. .but if disk performance is your problem for that amount of data... why not use a portable drive? Laptops are powerful enough.. the only limitation is the disk performance.
Plus.. making the point that this isn't really portable is still valid. My SFF is a desktop just like anyone else's.. yet it's a lot lighter than this hybrid they are referring to. What's the purpose? I think the innovation is great, but it needs work.
Why are you so ornery? Is there something wrong with making valid points?
LOL
:-)
I bet that really sucked carrying up a hill both ways too.
That's not a portable! My laptop is heavy at 8lbs and it sucks to carry around with all of the gadgets and gizmos. Heck... even my SFF is lighter than 20 pounds. I love the concept but the weight has to improve big time.
If there was such a thing, I don't believe it would be an SLR anymore.
The request is very common though. I wish I had it sometimes. Then again, when I use digital P&S cameras I find the display impossible to view in most bright light situations. I think I prefer the view finder for this reason.. or a combination of the two.
It does seem that they could create a new prism that splits to the view finder, CCD & shutter, and a third CCD for the screen. I wonder what additional aberations this would create?
What if the system is turned on and it starts hitting the security cameras? Seems like this could backfire.
:-)
I mean... seems like you have a great test case to know if you can rob a place. Try you cell phone camera, if it doesn't work you know the "Smile, you're on camera" sign is bogus.
Why are people such jerks on Slashdot in the past week? What happened in the press that got people so ornery?
I'm merely trying to be clear on the facts. Why post CEfGW when you know it to be otherwise in this case?
It really doesn't matter. But for those that don't know.. the government does care about being very very close when it comes to the Earth. Much closer than anyone else.
Which is close enough for government work.
Do you know what WGS84 is, who created it, and why?