Yup... Intel actually had it on the motherboard a good five years before Microsoft had any proper support for USB. Most Windows 95 machines, shipped in 1995, had USB, even though they didn't always bring it out to a USB connector. Intel's implementation actually worked, once you loaded up Windows 98. Apple introduced the iMac G3 in 1998, with USB as a replacement only for Apple's usual slew of proprietary connectors: ADB, GeoPort, etc. The systems did have built-in modems, Ethernet, and Firewire as a replacement for SCSI... USB was really just the "desktop bus" replacement at the time.
So if EVERY iPhone owner is on Facebook, and every iPhone ever sold was still in use, that would still mean that not quite half of users who regularly visit Facebook via the iPhone are using someone else's iPhone to do so (eg, there have only been a bit over 50 million iPhones sold since the very beginning, and it's a certainty they are not all still in use).
There are two things Flash does. One is that it allows the App Store bypass for simple games. You're not going to find Flash ideal for all applications, but it's decent for some. Apple's now just dandy with Flash + AIR on the iPhone, as long as they're getting their share through the iTunes store... so no more arguments of performance or reliability need apply. Cash, on the other hand, has been Apple's prime motive for quite some time, and this is just part of that.
The other thing Flash offers is DRMed video, which can only otherwise show up via the iTunes store, or specifically allowed applications (Netflix or whatever). This is even more in direct competition with Apple -- if I can watch last week's episode of the TV show I missed, free online, why would I pay the couple of bucks for a download from the iTunes store? Most television content providers want you to see the show free if you'd like, but they have to protect their future sales of this media (DVD, etc) so they are not going to offer it unprotected -- eg, in HTML5. Apple's known this all along, thus their push for HTML5, the format that's not competitive to any revenue source.
The other broswers in the App Store are not full browsers. They're still using elements of Apple's browser, such as the Javascript engine, or they would not be allowed in the App Store. For the same reason, no, Apple will not currently allow another brower with Flash in the App Store. In either case, that would be "application with interpreter"... whether its Javascript or Actionscript, Apple won't have one they don't control. At least not yet.
As for Flash, it's just dandy on my 550MHz Droid. That's a moderate-speed Android device by today's standards. Obviously, there may be some flash heavy sites are a bit much... then again, that's potentially true of any site on any mobile device. I didn't really find any iPhone all that usable as a web browser, simply due to the poor resolution. Once I got the Droid (854x480, plus no need for on-screen keyboard), it was a significant threshold -- I do more actual "browsing" on the device than the PC these days. I'm sure the same is true of the iPhone4, at least until you need to type.
I mean, consider the fact that these modern smartphones are already significantly faster than PCs were not all that long ago. Or even still... the Cortex A8 used in most current devices is only a bit slower per MHz than the Intel Atoms used in Netbooks... and on most devices, they have only 1/2-1/4 of the screen real estate to draw. The new Cortex A9 ARMs are closer still, dual core, faster clocked, lower power, and coming Real Soon Now. Saying "it's just a phone" is increasingly a cop-out.
When Flash came out in 1996, the "hot new" PC processors were the original 150MHz and 166MHz Pentiums. In 1999-2000, I was part of a set-top box development project. Our web browser ran Shockwave quite nicely... on a 90MHz or 144MHz Coldfire CPU, and at 640x576, considerably more resolution than all but the top-end smartphones today. Sure, Flash has evolved, but you don't need a 2GHz CPU to run Flash.
And it is very true that Apple didn't offer video acceleration APIs on MacOS until a pretty recent update (end of Spring or so). Microsoft had video acceleration APIs back in XP, and they improved them considerably in Vista. iOS still doesn't offer these APIs.
Of course, one has to wonder, with Apple working so hard against Adobe, how much time they've spent optimizing Flash for MacOS anyway. That's only 5% of the client PC market, and Apple's making it difficult for them. How long would you put up with that crap? With modern Mac systems, it's quite evident that Flash, particularly versions from before late Spring, run much faster on Windows, on the same hardware. That demonstrates that neither Flash nor the hardware are the real problem.
So while you may fault Adobe for performance, it certainly was not entirely their fault. Playback in software vs. hardware is a huge hit on any system, but on a portable device, it's make or break. But even on the desktop. I have a four processor Intel Core2 desktop here at 2.83GHz. Without GPU acceleration, a fairly high-end video file (1920x1080/60p) will just barely play without glitches. Use MS's own AVC CODEC and plain old ugly Windows Media Player on Windows 7, and I'm getting perfect playback and only 12% CPU use.
The more recent cellphone/tablet class chips can play at least 1080/24p at full HD resolution via hardware acceleration (dedicated AVC units, not general purpose GPUs -- PC graphics chips have some of both resources). And not just play it, but play it a fairly low power. It doesn't matter one iota if the AVC comes in via HTML5, Flash, or MP4 files stored on the device, the result is the same... as long as whatever player you're using has access to the video acceleration APIs. Which they do in Android, don't in iOS. Nuff said.
Adobe isn't trying to get Apple to buy Flash. They give the plug-ins away, and would be happy to deliver a free plug-in for iOS. They make money on the tools. And yeah, they're moving the tools to support HTML5 stuff, too.
If Apple was really out to destroy Flash, they'd take a different tactic. Imagine if Google wanted to kill Flash for some reason. Leaving it out of the browser might hurt Flash, or it might hurt your browser. They'd kill Flash by delivering web authoring tools that are better than Adobe's Flash (and other tools), but free. In short, they'd eliminate the reason people use Flash, which is simple: it allows Webmasters and other content people to create things that would otherwise take programmers hacking raw Javascript.
Apple just makes up stories about performance and other issues. And as with most tall tales, they're easily replaced by the truth.
Which, in this case, is that Flash is pretty good on Android, on hardware no faster than Apple's 2009 products. Yeah, I have a Droid and use Flash on Android 2.2. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. If the video's in MP4/AVC, it's no different than MP4/AVC in HTML5 or the dedicated YouTube player, other than it being more likely to work than most of the HTML5 sites I've visited so far.
I now have access to a fairly large number of sites that were previously off-limits to my mobile browser. Some of that's video... I can see MS-NBC videos now, which were previously invisible (as was just about anything that didn't host video on YouTube). But much of it's just plain silly stuff... like the JC Penney online catalog, or more than a few Semiconductor vendors' sites, which for whatever reasons, are authored in Flash. These work pretty much as well as they would on a PC. No performance problems.
The bottom line for a user is that my Android device is now pretty much a first-class web client, where before it wasn't. Maybe Apple thinks their customers are fine with only part of the web being accessible (and for whatever reasons, even before this, my kids' iPod Touch devices failed on a number of sites that worked just dandy on the Droid... don't know what that's all about). I'm glad Google thinks the mobile device should work as well as a desktop, and is pushing the technology THEY ACTUALLY CONTROL to make that happen, rather than simply expecting the world to revolve about their axis.
I tried the video part of that site. Works great in Chrome, as most things do. Curiously, though, the video failed not just on IE8, Opera 10.6 and Firefox 3.6 (all rejected by the site entirely), but it didn't play on Safari 5.0 either (on Windows 7 64-bit here). There are definitely issues with HTML5 yet. And Safari...
I worked up a web site (sorry, not public) using HTML5 video with Flash fallback, and a separate flash-only version of the site. The HTML5 site has MP4/AVC and VP8/WebM versions of one video, MP4/AVC and Ogg Theora versions the other, as well as the Flash. IE8 just falls back properly to Flash. Google Chrome on the PC correctly plays the HTML5 MP4. Safari (5.0) and Firefox (3.6) both puke on the HTML5, rather than fall back to Flash. Opera (10.62) is good with the VP8, but pukes on the Ogg Theora, again with no fallback.. all on Windows. HTML5 also fails on Android Froyo on the Droid, no play, no flash fallback for video the browser can't play.
They all work on the flash-only site, including the Droid.
This is not supposed to be rocket science, folks... you create the assets, upload them, link 'em within a tag, and it should work. There are still big issues that need to be fixed here. Far as I can see, flash is still the de-facto universal standard, like it or not. Encoding problems? Nope.. they're all correctly encoded. Web optimized... no ideas... there's no HTML5 knowledge yet in commonly available AVC encoders, and of course, the WebM and Ogg stuff are pretty much single sourced encoders, so they ought to just work. eh?
And part of the problem is just history -- unlike Apple or even Microsoft, these device companies are not coming out of the desktop PC business, for the most part (sure, some of those guys, Dell and Asus and others, are jumping in too). In the usual world of consumer electronics, these companies have been ever-so-slowly moving toward a little bit of support.
In the early days of DVD players, a good number of player releases failed on DVD-Rs... not because they couldn't play them in hardware, but because there was a bug in the original Philips reference code that everyone copied. Few of these were supplied with upgrades -- the companies had moved on to the next thing. Things have got better in the Blu-Ray generation, though it's still very vendor dependent -- some of the early Samsung players were not upgradeable.
Same idea with phones... if you got an update, it was either to fix a bug, or in a few cases, just to advance an evil agenda. One Verizon update I got for my RAZR pulled out BlueTooth OBEX -- they didn't like the idea that you could copy photos to your PC over BT, rather than paying for the web upload or email to your PC.
Now we personal computer folks are eyeing these devices are pocket computers, and they are. But it's a definite learning process for CE companies to have to support a device much beyond its introduction, much less with continued OS upgrades. Some companies are definitely not going to be as good at this as others. I'm also watching who's releasing their stuff as open source and who isn't... the option of a non-vendor upgrade is largely dependent on this. It also helps to realize that a company is far more likely to spend the effort on their flagship product than some discount model. One reason I waited for the Droid.
Yeah, I'm not overly concerned about fragmentation. Why? These are cellphones, not PCs. In theory at least, most 1.6 devices will be gone before you know it. The one problem there: the stupid behavior of some companies to deliver a brand new device with 1.6, even for devices shipping post-2.2. That's just inexcusable.
The other issue is coverage... if an application absolutely needs 2.1 or 2.2 APIs that are not available on 1.6, it won't work on 1.6 anyway. If it can get by with optional features, there's no reason an app can't support several generation of Android. After all, precisely the same things are done in desktop operating systems: the app asks about the OS revision, and makes adjustments.
One big problem with Android at the moment is that the OS proper and the lower-level device drivers are all blended together, at least functionally. In short, you don't need "Android 2.1" for your device, you need your device's build of Android 2.1. Imagine if Linux or Windows were that vendor and model specific. They aren't, for the simple fact that every PC has a BIOS that allows it to function well enough without the OS to boot the OS.
Windows NT extended this one further, by providing a hardware abstraction layer. This allows operation on non-PC architectures (MIPS, Alpha, PPC, and higher-end non-PC x86 machines) without the need to wire platform specifics into Windows itself.
Android really ought to split the OS ROM image into two pieces. The first piece, the responsibility of Motorola or HTC or whomever, is the Hardware Abstraction Layer module. This would contain low-level drivers for just that device, in a form easily used by any [new] version of Android. Then you have a generic Android boot image, which taps the HAL for any hardware-related services.
This would allow Google to post new versions of Android in the Marketplace, which would download and run on any Android device.
Naturally, this wouldn't preclude any of the customizations that manufacturers or carriers built on top of Android. But it would make it a little easier to upgrade, and remove that burden from these guys -- they only need to maintain their HALs... mainly bug fixes, since features wouldn't likely change very often.
Given that this has been done, several times (the original Qt library was one of these efforts) already, for Linux based devices, I'd say "not all that much". Certainly not something so difficult it wouldn't be done. Like my old Sharp Zaurus PDA, running Qtopia on a 200-something-MHz ARM, etc.
Yup... the iPad isn't much different than a bigger iPod Touch -- there's nothing about it that makes it fundamentally different, in OS needs, than an iPod or iPhone. They boosted the CPU speed a bit, but it's the same Cortex A8 CPU as in the previous iPhones, and exactly the same CPU as in the iPhone 4. There are already Android phones faster than the iPad, not to mention tablets. They are the same kind of device, tablet, smartphone, PDA, etc... particularly when Apple's making them, removing any of the typical I/O-add-on features one might expect from a notebook/netbook replacement.
Not just that, but if the iOS was really so tablet oriented before the iPhone came along, they either seriously screwed that up, or they stripped out all of the Pad-oriented features before progressing to the iPhone. After all, until the added functions in 3.2 or whatever for the iPad (which was only for the iPad), they had completely hardwired the screen resolution to 480x320. That's not a resolution you'd pick for a tablet... and even Android, versions ago, had support for multiple resolutions. That's pretty obvious.
So this has lead to older apps being upscaled on the iPad and even new iPhone 4... and also why the iPhone 4 had to go to 960x640 pixels -- makes the doubling so much easier.
Android is at least as ready for tablets as iPhoneOS was last Spring. The big difference right now is that Google's not sure about... or at least, not fully behind it, not making it easy or even possible for all tablet devices to have Market access, etc.
The simple fact is that only a few different operating systems get consumer buzz at any given time. Android on a tablet is one of those that people want on tablets today. I expect to buy one, maybe this year. I have absolutely no use for a ChromeOS based tablet at the moment -- I need things to be fully functional when offline.
You're certainly up there... it depends on the film. The 5D sensor delivers a maximum hardware resolution of 78lp/mm. That's certainly up there, at least as far as sharpness goes (dynamic range, color accuracy, I'll leave to another discussion). It's a bit hard to compare to film, since you typically rate a film based on an MTF curve. If you don't have the curve handy, you can probably find f50 numbers, which is the resolution at 50% MTF. This puts T-Max 100 at 125lp/mm, Fujicolor Superia 100 at 63lp/mm, and Kodachrome 64 at a whopping 36lp/mm. Obviously, the 5D's sensor is 100% at 78lp/mm... so yeah, very sharp. And most chromes are similarly low in sharpness.. they're highly regarded due to fine grain. And no additional convolution in the printing process.
So yeah, in practical terms, the 5D is going to outperform any color film on sharpness, and pretty close to any pan film, if you can find one still made. This is not exactly a shock... there's a reason pros have largely moved to digital. It's not just consumers anymore.
I suppose it's historically correct to say that diffraction is only an issue at small aperatures, but that's largely a function of historical media -- film. Kodak publishes their resolution numbers, and the sharpest 35mm film they make is T-Max 100, which has f50 = 125lp/mm (50% MTF). Color films, and particularly chromes, are just not that sharp... ISO50 Veliva (which everyone shoots at ISO40) has an f50=45lp/mm. Kodak Ultra Color 100UC delivers 72lp/mm.
Given that the effective resolution will never be higher than that of the weakest link, using film, or most digital cameras, yields the observation that diffraction only matters at lower f-stops. But drop that 230lp/mm sensor in there,and things change.
Right at the Rayleigh limit, MTF is about 9%. So using that rule, at f8, you're getting a theoretical maximum of 9% MTF at 200lp/mm. In other worse, you see something every so slightly different than a grey blur... in layman's terms, you have 9% lines, 91% greyness. You'll need to go to f2.8 to get a 50% MTF at 250lp/mm... that's going to look pretty decent with this sensor, though of course, you have half the original contrast. And these of course assume a theoretically perfect lens, which you don't have the in first place. Diffraction loss is only one source of trouble.
Seriously. I bought my wife a Panasonic Lumix P&S digital 3-4 years ago, with optical image stabilization. She had been using my Canon Pro90IS, also with optical image stabilization... that's from about 10 years ago. Most every consumer P&S and camcorder has some form of image stabilization these days.
But this has nothing to do with diffraction. You can't beat physics. Small cameras have been very affected by diffraction for a long time (including video cameras)... it's less of an issue in the 35mm-class world, but still an issue. When you stop way down, your sharpness is going to be diffraction limited. Even back in the days of film.
Yup. I can fill a terabyte per project when I do multicamera shoots, easily. And do -- cheap SATA drives and a plug-in drive bay is a great way to move from project to project. I've got unedited Cineform files around here over 100GB. Ok, not "normal".. but also not what the average/. geek is likely to be doing, either. The average consumer is going to fill a drive faster than the average coder, unless the latter has a need to keep every ISO for every Linux distro at one's fingertips.
They're kind of selling snake oil. They make a big deal about the fact the these cameras deliver true RBG color per pixel, but then go on to advertise the number of sensor sites as the number of pixels, which is totally incorrect. They're falling up against the human eye -- we have about 120M luma-sensitive sensors per eye, but only about 6M chroma-sensitive sensors (and only about 10% of those blue-sensitive). We care a great deal about resolution, less so about color. And the resolution you get from these is 4.6Mpixel. Foveon doesn't seem to have had much of a second act, even after Sigma bought them.
There are other issues. The Foveon design is very clever, but kind of flawed. They're counting on the natural color filtering properties of silicon, and while it's a cool idea, the color filtering is somewhat off. So they have to do lots of image processing and color correction on the final result, anyway. Back when everyone else has 6-8 Mpixel sensors, you could make an argument for the Foveon chip, particularly for portrait photography, where you care more about color than resolution (well, except when shooting crusty old geezers in monochrome). But in a day when you can buy a Canon or Nikon DSLR at $700-$800 with an 18Mpixel sensor and full HD video capabilities, this one makes no sense.
As far as the cameras, the Sigma DSLRs are mighty expensive for an entry-level model with a 4.6Mpixel sensor. Sigma calls them "pro" models, but that's marketing speak for "we don't make anything higher end". Much in the same way Pabst is a "Premium" beer.
The one thing I liked from Sigma is the DP1/DP2. They had issues, but the notion of dropping a full-sized APS sensor, even the Foveon chip, into a roughly pocket-sized P&S is a good one. Of course, today, we have Sony NEX and Panasonic/Olympus doing similar sized cameras, only with interchangeable lenses.
Which Olympus (I still own an OM-1 and an OM-4)? If it's an automatic model, do you ALWAYS use auto-exposure? Olympus OM-series didn't do autofocus (well, there was the "failed experiment" of the OM-77
Auto-focus is no different.. there's a switch on any Canon lens to turn it off and let you focus manually. Most models also have a button that lets you move the auto-focus zone around, which is also useful. You may want a different ground glass screen if you do lots of manual focusing, though (and you get a Canon model that offers this). Due to the AF, most Canons (and other modern DSLRs) don't offer the hand-dandy focusing aids on the ground glass by default anymore.
As for the lens you want, there is an OM System Zuiko that's 300mm f4.5, about $300 these days on eBay. They also a 350mm at f2.8 -- still really expensive, if you can locate one.
That's actually what we're going to see with a 120Mpixel sensor. This one delivers 230lp/mm. You can get a theoretical maximum of about 250lp/mm on any 35mm lens at f2.8 with a 50% MTF. You can get all the way to 80% MTF at 230lp/mm going up to f1.2... but who's got an f1.2 lens. Ok, I used to have one too, for my old Canon rangefinder, but in multiple focal lengths? Stop down to f4.0 or so, and you won't be able to tell between the 120Mpixel sensor and a 60Mpixel sensor. And that's just due to diffraction limits.
Not that I'd have a problem trading in either of my DSLRs (Nikon D70, Canon EOS 350D) for one of these, mind you;-)
I sort of agree. Of course, a microlens is a convex circular/semisphere, depending on the particulars. So you only at best cover PI/4 of a unit sensor site.
But of course, you can't even have a microlens covering quite the full circle. In-between each sensor site, you have baffles, to prevent light scattering from one site to the next. These take up a finite space... more of the total area, as you grow the number of pixels. I'm sure it's a fairly small nit to pick, but hey, this is slash-dot:-)
It's also rather interesting how this sensor is pretty much suggesting the limit on 35mm (or smaller) camera sensors. Just based on physics (diffraction based on wavelength), you can only ever get a 50% MTF at around 250lp/mm and f2.8. For 80% MTF in the same resolution, you need about f1.2. That's for yellow-green light; you'll do a little better under bluer light, a little worse under red light. So at the majority of working apertures, you're probably not going to be able to tell between a photo shot with a 120Mpixel sensor and one scaled up from an 60Mpixel sensor on a 35mm-class camera... and that's with a very good lens.
And then there's the problem of diffraction. For a 35mm lens, the physical limit for an f2.8 lens, on green-yellow light, is 247lp/mm at MTF 50%, 104lp/mm at MTF 80%. To meet or beat that 230lp/mm at 80% MTF, you'll need about an f1.2 lens.
In short, no such better lens is going to exist for a 35mm camera, period. The only way to really take advantage of 120Mpixels is to go to medium format digital. Hasselblad already sells a 60Mpixel digital back.
All a micro-lens can do for you is make a smaller sensor seem to occupy the full sensor-cell space available to it. So if you have a 2.2mm x 2.2mm sensor site (as in this 120MPixel example), the micro lens gives you the effect of a 2.2mm x 2.2mm sensor, even if in the actual silicon, it's smaller.
However, you can't steal light from your neighbors. Compare this to a Canon 5D Mk II sensor... the pixel pitch on this model is 6.4mm x 6.4mm. That's nearly 8.5x the area per pixel. There's absolutely nothing a microlens can do to make this any better for the 120Mpixel sensor.
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Yup... Intel actually had it on the motherboard a good five years before Microsoft had any proper support for USB. Most Windows 95 machines, shipped in 1995, had USB, even though they didn't always bring it out to a USB connector. Intel's implementation actually worked, once you loaded up Windows 98. Apple introduced the iMac G3 in 1998, with USB as a replacement only for Apple's usual slew of proprietary connectors: ADB, GeoPort, etc. The systems did have built-in modems, Ethernet, and Firewire as a replacement for SCSI... USB was really just the "desktop bus" replacement at the time.
So if EVERY iPhone owner is on Facebook, and every iPhone ever sold was still in use, that would still mean that not quite half of users who regularly visit Facebook via the iPhone are using someone else's iPhone to do so (eg, there have only been a bit over 50 million iPhones sold since the very beginning, and it's a certainty they are not all still in use).
There are two things Flash does. One is that it allows the App Store bypass for simple games. You're not going to find Flash ideal for all applications, but it's decent for some. Apple's now just dandy with Flash + AIR on the iPhone, as long as they're getting their share through the iTunes store... so no more arguments of performance or reliability need apply. Cash, on the other hand, has been Apple's prime motive for quite some time, and this is just part of that.
The other thing Flash offers is DRMed video, which can only otherwise show up via the iTunes store, or specifically allowed applications (Netflix or whatever). This is even more in direct competition with Apple -- if I can watch last week's episode of the TV show I missed, free online, why would I pay the couple of bucks for a download from the iTunes store? Most television content providers want you to see the show free if you'd like, but they have to protect their future sales of this media (DVD, etc) so they are not going to offer it unprotected -- eg, in HTML5. Apple's known this all along, thus their push for HTML5, the format that's not competitive to any revenue source.
The other broswers in the App Store are not full browsers. They're still using elements of Apple's browser, such as the Javascript engine, or they would not be allowed in the App Store. For the same reason, no, Apple will not currently allow another brower with Flash in the App Store. In either case, that would be "application with interpreter"... whether its Javascript or Actionscript, Apple won't have one they don't control. At least not yet.
As for Flash, it's just dandy on my 550MHz Droid. That's a moderate-speed Android device by today's standards. Obviously, there may be some flash heavy sites are a bit much... then again, that's potentially true of any site on any mobile device. I didn't really find any iPhone all that usable as a web browser, simply due to the poor resolution. Once I got the Droid (854x480, plus no need for on-screen keyboard), it was a significant threshold -- I do more actual "browsing" on the device than the PC these days. I'm sure the same is true of the iPhone4, at least until you need to type.
I mean, consider the fact that these modern smartphones are already significantly faster than PCs were not all that long ago. Or even still... the Cortex A8 used in most current devices is only a bit slower per MHz than the Intel Atoms used in Netbooks... and on most devices, they have only 1/2-1/4 of the screen real estate to draw. The new Cortex A9 ARMs are closer still, dual core, faster clocked, lower power, and coming Real Soon Now. Saying "it's just a phone" is increasingly a cop-out.
When Flash came out in 1996, the "hot new" PC processors were the original 150MHz and 166MHz Pentiums. In 1999-2000, I was part of a set-top box development project. Our web browser ran Shockwave quite nicely... on a 90MHz or 144MHz Coldfire CPU, and at 640x576, considerably more resolution than all but the top-end smartphones today. Sure, Flash has evolved, but you don't need a 2GHz CPU to run Flash.
And it is very true that Apple didn't offer video acceleration APIs on MacOS until a pretty recent update (end of Spring or so). Microsoft had video acceleration APIs back in XP, and they improved them considerably in Vista. iOS still doesn't offer these APIs.
Of course, one has to wonder, with Apple working so hard against Adobe, how much time they've spent optimizing Flash for MacOS anyway. That's only 5% of the client PC market, and Apple's making it difficult for them. How long would you put up with that crap? With modern Mac systems, it's quite evident that Flash, particularly versions from before late Spring, run much faster on Windows, on the same hardware. That demonstrates that neither Flash nor the hardware are the real problem.
So while you may fault Adobe for performance, it certainly was not entirely their fault. Playback in software vs. hardware is a huge hit on any system, but on a portable device, it's make or break. But even on the desktop. I have a four processor Intel Core2 desktop here at 2.83GHz. Without GPU acceleration, a fairly high-end video file (1920x1080/60p) will just barely play without glitches. Use MS's own AVC CODEC and plain old ugly Windows Media Player on Windows 7, and I'm getting perfect playback and only 12% CPU use.
The more recent cellphone/tablet class chips can play at least 1080/24p at full HD resolution via hardware acceleration (dedicated AVC units, not general purpose GPUs -- PC graphics chips have some of both resources). And not just play it, but play it a fairly low power. It doesn't matter one iota if the AVC comes in via HTML5, Flash, or MP4 files stored on the device, the result is the same... as long as whatever player you're using has access to the video acceleration APIs. Which they do in Android, don't in iOS. Nuff said.
Adobe isn't trying to get Apple to buy Flash. They give the plug-ins away, and would be happy to deliver a free plug-in for iOS. They make money on the tools. And yeah, they're moving the tools to support HTML5 stuff, too.
If Apple was really out to destroy Flash, they'd take a different tactic. Imagine if Google wanted to kill Flash for some reason. Leaving it out of the browser might hurt Flash, or it might hurt your browser. They'd kill Flash by delivering web authoring tools that are better than Adobe's Flash (and other tools), but free. In short, they'd eliminate the reason people use Flash, which is simple: it allows Webmasters and other content people to create things that would otherwise take programmers hacking raw Javascript.
Apple just makes up stories about performance and other issues. And as with most tall tales, they're easily replaced by the truth.
Which, in this case, is that Flash is pretty good on Android, on hardware no faster than Apple's 2009 products. Yeah, I have a Droid and use Flash on Android 2.2. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. If the video's in MP4/AVC, it's no different than MP4/AVC in HTML5 or the dedicated YouTube player, other than it being more likely to work than most of the HTML5 sites I've visited so far.
I now have access to a fairly large number of sites that were previously off-limits to my mobile browser. Some of that's video... I can see MS-NBC videos now, which were previously invisible (as was just about anything that didn't host video on YouTube). But much of it's just plain silly stuff ... like the JC Penney online catalog, or more than a few Semiconductor vendors' sites, which for whatever reasons, are authored in Flash. These work pretty much as well as they would on a PC. No performance problems.
The bottom line for a user is that my Android device is now pretty much a first-class web client, where before it wasn't. Maybe Apple thinks their customers are fine with only part of the web being accessible (and for whatever reasons, even before this, my kids' iPod Touch devices failed on a number of sites that worked just dandy on the Droid... don't know what that's all about). I'm glad Google thinks the mobile device should work as well as a desktop, and is pushing the technology THEY ACTUALLY CONTROL to make that happen, rather than simply expecting the world to revolve about their axis.
I tried the video part of that site. Works great in Chrome, as most things do. Curiously, though, the video failed not just on IE8, Opera 10.6 and Firefox 3.6 (all rejected by the site entirely), but it didn't play on Safari 5.0 either (on Windows 7 64-bit here). There are definitely issues with HTML5 yet. And Safari...
Indeed.
I worked up a web site (sorry, not public) using HTML5 video with Flash fallback, and a separate flash-only version of the site. The HTML5 site has MP4/AVC and VP8/WebM versions of one video, MP4/AVC and Ogg Theora versions the other, as well as the Flash. IE8 just falls back properly to Flash. Google Chrome on the PC correctly plays the HTML5 MP4. Safari (5.0) and Firefox (3.6) both puke on the HTML5, rather than fall back to Flash. Opera (10.62) is good with the VP8, but pukes on the Ogg Theora, again with no fallback.. all on Windows. HTML5 also fails on Android Froyo on the Droid, no play, no flash fallback for video the browser can't play.
They all work on the flash-only site, including the Droid.
This is not supposed to be rocket science, folks... you create the assets, upload them, link 'em within a tag, and it should work. There are still big issues that need to be fixed here. Far as I can see, flash is still the de-facto universal standard, like it or not. Encoding problems? Nope.. they're all correctly encoded. Web optimized... no ideas... there's no HTML5 knowledge yet in commonly available AVC encoders, and of course, the WebM and Ogg stuff are pretty much single sourced encoders, so they ought to just work. eh?
And part of the problem is just history -- unlike Apple or even Microsoft, these device companies are not coming out of the desktop PC business, for the most part (sure, some of those guys, Dell and Asus and others, are jumping in too). In the usual world of consumer electronics, these companies have been ever-so-slowly moving toward a little bit of support.
In the early days of DVD players, a good number of player releases failed on DVD-Rs... not because they couldn't play them in hardware, but because there was a bug in the original Philips reference code that everyone copied. Few of these were supplied with upgrades -- the companies had moved on to the next thing. Things have got better in the Blu-Ray generation, though it's still very vendor dependent -- some of the early Samsung players were not upgradeable.
Same idea with phones... if you got an update, it was either to fix a bug, or in a few cases, just to advance an evil agenda. One Verizon update I got for my RAZR pulled out BlueTooth OBEX -- they didn't like the idea that you could copy photos to your PC over BT, rather than paying for the web upload or email to your PC.
Now we personal computer folks are eyeing these devices are pocket computers, and they are. But it's a definite learning process for CE companies to have to support a device much beyond its introduction, much less with continued OS upgrades. Some companies are definitely not going to be as good at this as others. I'm also watching who's releasing their stuff as open source and who isn't... the option of a non-vendor upgrade is largely dependent on this. It also helps to realize that a company is far more likely to spend the effort on their flagship product than some discount model. One reason I waited for the Droid.
Not really... Apple simply defines those "not capable of running it" as the systems they no longer feel like supporting.
Yeah, I'm not overly concerned about fragmentation. Why? These are cellphones, not PCs. In theory at least, most 1.6 devices will be gone before you know it. The one problem there: the stupid behavior of some companies to deliver a brand new device with 1.6, even for devices shipping post-2.2. That's just inexcusable.
The other issue is coverage... if an application absolutely needs 2.1 or 2.2 APIs that are not available on 1.6, it won't work on 1.6 anyway. If it can get by with optional features, there's no reason an app can't support several generation of Android. After all, precisely the same things are done in desktop operating systems: the app asks about the OS revision, and makes adjustments.
One big problem with Android at the moment is that the OS proper and the lower-level device drivers are all blended together, at least functionally. In short, you don't need "Android 2.1" for your device, you need your device's build of Android 2.1. Imagine if Linux or Windows were that vendor and model specific. They aren't, for the simple fact that every PC has a BIOS that allows it to function well enough without the OS to boot the OS.
Windows NT extended this one further, by providing a hardware abstraction layer. This allows operation on non-PC architectures (MIPS, Alpha, PPC, and higher-end non-PC x86 machines) without the need to wire platform specifics into Windows itself.
Android really ought to split the OS ROM image into two pieces. The first piece, the responsibility of Motorola or HTC or whomever, is the Hardware Abstraction Layer module. This would contain low-level drivers for just that device, in a form easily used by any [new] version of Android. Then you have a generic Android boot image, which taps the HAL for any hardware-related services.
This would allow Google to post new versions of Android in the Marketplace, which would download and run on any Android device.
Naturally, this wouldn't preclude any of the customizations that manufacturers or carriers built on top of Android. But it would make it a little easier to upgrade, and remove that burden from these guys -- they only need to maintain their HALs... mainly bug fixes, since features wouldn't likely change very often.
Given that this has been done, several times (the original Qt library was one of these efforts) already, for Linux based devices, I'd say "not all that much". Certainly not something so difficult it wouldn't be done. Like my old Sharp Zaurus PDA, running Qtopia on a 200-something-MHz ARM, etc.
Yup... the iPad isn't much different than a bigger iPod Touch -- there's nothing about it that makes it fundamentally different, in OS needs, than an iPod or iPhone. They boosted the CPU speed a bit, but it's the same Cortex A8 CPU as in the previous iPhones, and exactly the same CPU as in the iPhone 4. There are already Android phones faster than the iPad, not to mention tablets. They are the same kind of device, tablet, smartphone, PDA, etc... particularly when Apple's making them, removing any of the typical I/O-add-on features one might expect from a notebook/netbook replacement.
Not just that, but if the iOS was really so tablet oriented before the iPhone came along, they either seriously screwed that up, or they stripped out all of the Pad-oriented features before progressing to the iPhone. After all, until the added functions in 3.2 or whatever for the iPad (which was only for the iPad), they had completely hardwired the screen resolution to 480x320. That's not a resolution you'd pick for a tablet... and even Android, versions ago, had support for multiple resolutions. That's pretty obvious.
So this has lead to older apps being upscaled on the iPad and even new iPhone 4... and also why the iPhone 4 had to go to 960x640 pixels -- makes the doubling so much easier.
Android is at least as ready for tablets as iPhoneOS was last Spring. The big difference right now is that Google's not sure about... or at least, not fully behind it, not making it easy or even possible for all tablet devices to have Market access, etc.
The simple fact is that only a few different operating systems get consumer buzz at any given time. Android on a tablet is one of those that people want on tablets today. I expect to buy one, maybe this year. I have absolutely no use for a ChromeOS based tablet at the moment -- I need things to be fully functional when offline.
The British Glen Beck, I presume.
You're certainly up there... it depends on the film. The 5D sensor delivers a maximum hardware resolution of 78lp/mm. That's certainly up there, at least as far as sharpness goes (dynamic range, color accuracy, I'll leave to another discussion). It's a bit hard to compare to film, since you typically rate a film based on an MTF curve. If you don't have the curve handy, you can probably find f50 numbers, which is the resolution at 50% MTF. This puts T-Max 100 at 125lp/mm, Fujicolor Superia 100 at 63lp/mm, and Kodachrome 64 at a whopping 36lp/mm. Obviously, the 5D's sensor is 100% at 78lp/mm... so yeah, very sharp. And most chromes are similarly low in sharpness.. they're highly regarded due to fine grain. And no additional convolution in the printing process.
So yeah, in practical terms, the 5D is going to outperform any color film on sharpness, and pretty close to any pan film, if you can find one still made. This is not exactly a shock... there's a reason pros have largely moved to digital. It's not just consumers anymore.
I suppose it's historically correct to say that diffraction is only an issue at small aperatures, but that's largely a function of historical media -- film. Kodak publishes their resolution numbers, and the sharpest 35mm film they make is T-Max 100, which has f50 = 125lp/mm (50% MTF). Color films, and particularly chromes, are just not that sharp... ISO50 Veliva (which everyone shoots at ISO40) has an f50=45lp/mm. Kodak Ultra Color 100UC delivers 72lp/mm.
Given that the effective resolution will never be higher than that of the weakest link, using film, or most digital cameras, yields the observation that diffraction only matters at lower f-stops. But drop that 230lp/mm sensor in there,and things change.
Right at the Rayleigh limit, MTF is about 9%. So using that rule, at f8, you're getting a theoretical maximum of 9% MTF at 200lp/mm. In other worse, you see something every so slightly different than a grey blur... in layman's terms, you have 9% lines, 91% greyness. You'll need to go to f2.8 to get a 50% MTF at 250lp/mm... that's going to look pretty decent with this sensor, though of course, you have half the original contrast. And these of course assume a theoretically perfect lens, which you don't have the in first place. Diffraction loss is only one source of trouble.
Seriously. I bought my wife a Panasonic Lumix P&S digital 3-4 years ago, with optical image stabilization. She had been using my Canon Pro90IS, also with optical image stabilization... that's from about 10 years ago. Most every consumer P&S and camcorder has some form of image stabilization these days.
But this has nothing to do with diffraction. You can't beat physics. Small cameras have been very affected by diffraction for a long time (including video cameras)... it's less of an issue in the 35mm-class world, but still an issue. When you stop way down, your sharpness is going to be diffraction limited. Even back in the days of film.
Yup. I can fill a terabyte per project when I do multicamera shoots, easily. And do -- cheap SATA drives and a plug-in drive bay is a great way to move from project to project. I've got unedited Cineform files around here over 100GB. Ok, not "normal".. but also not what the average /. geek is likely to be doing, either. The average consumer is going to fill a drive faster than the average coder, unless the latter has a need to keep every ISO for every Linux distro at one's fingertips.
Sigma just released another version of their Foveon-based DSLR, but it's using the same 4.6Mpixel sensor they introduced five or more years ago.
http://www.sigmaphoto.com/shop/sd15-digital-slr-camera
They're kind of selling snake oil. They make a big deal about the fact the these cameras deliver true RBG color per pixel, but then go on to advertise the number of sensor sites as the number of pixels, which is totally incorrect. They're falling up against the human eye -- we have about 120M luma-sensitive sensors per eye, but only about 6M chroma-sensitive sensors (and only about 10% of those blue-sensitive). We care a great deal about resolution, less so about color. And the resolution you get from these is 4.6Mpixel. Foveon doesn't seem to have had much of a second act, even after Sigma bought them.
There are other issues. The Foveon design is very clever, but kind of flawed. They're counting on the natural color filtering properties of silicon, and while it's a cool idea, the color filtering is somewhat off. So they have to do lots of image processing and color correction on the final result, anyway. Back when everyone else has 6-8 Mpixel sensors, you could make an argument for the Foveon chip, particularly for portrait photography, where you care more about color than resolution (well, except when shooting crusty old geezers in monochrome). But in a day when you can buy a Canon or Nikon DSLR at $700-$800 with an 18Mpixel sensor and full HD video capabilities, this one makes no sense.
As far as the cameras, the Sigma DSLRs are mighty expensive for an entry-level model with a 4.6Mpixel sensor. Sigma calls them "pro" models, but that's marketing speak for "we don't make anything higher end". Much in the same way Pabst is a "Premium" beer.
The one thing I liked from Sigma is the DP1/DP2. They had issues, but the notion of dropping a full-sized APS sensor, even the Foveon chip, into a roughly pocket-sized P&S is a good one. Of course, today, we have Sony NEX and Panasonic/Olympus doing similar sized cameras, only with interchangeable lenses.
Which Olympus (I still own an OM-1 and an OM-4)? If it's an automatic model, do you ALWAYS use auto-exposure? Olympus OM-series didn't do autofocus (well, there was the "failed experiment" of the OM-77
Auto-focus is no different.. there's a switch on any Canon lens to turn it off and let you focus manually. Most models also have a button that lets you move the auto-focus zone around, which is also useful. You may want a different ground glass screen if you do lots of manual focusing, though (and you get a Canon model that offers this). Due to the AF, most Canons (and other modern DSLRs) don't offer the hand-dandy focusing aids on the ground glass by default anymore.
As for the lens you want, there is an OM System Zuiko that's 300mm f4.5, about $300 these days on eBay. They also a 350mm at f2.8 -- still really expensive, if you can locate one.
That's actually what we're going to see with a 120Mpixel sensor. This one delivers 230lp/mm. You can get a theoretical maximum of about 250lp/mm on any 35mm lens at f2.8 with a 50% MTF. You can get all the way to 80% MTF at 230lp/mm going up to f1.2... but who's got an f1.2 lens. Ok, I used to have one too, for my old Canon rangefinder, but in multiple focal lengths? Stop down to f4.0 or so, and you won't be able to tell between the 120Mpixel sensor and a 60Mpixel sensor. And that's just due to diffraction limits.
Not that I'd have a problem trading in either of my DSLRs (Nikon D70, Canon EOS 350D) for one of these, mind you ;-)
I sort of agree. Of course, a microlens is a convex circular/semisphere, depending on the particulars. So you only at best cover PI/4 of a unit sensor site.
But of course, you can't even have a microlens covering quite the full circle. In-between each sensor site, you have baffles, to prevent light scattering from one site to the next. These take up a finite space... more of the total area, as you grow the number of pixels. I'm sure it's a fairly small nit to pick, but hey, this is slash-dot :-)
It's also rather interesting how this sensor is pretty much suggesting the limit on 35mm (or smaller) camera sensors. Just based on physics (diffraction based on wavelength), you can only ever get a 50% MTF at around 250lp/mm and f2.8. For 80% MTF in the same resolution, you need about f1.2. That's for yellow-green light; you'll do a little better under bluer light, a little worse under red light. So at the majority of working apertures, you're probably not going to be able to tell between a photo shot with a 120Mpixel sensor and one scaled up from an 60Mpixel sensor on a 35mm-class camera... and that's with a very good lens.
And then there's the problem of diffraction. For a 35mm lens, the physical limit for an f2.8 lens, on green-yellow light, is 247lp/mm at MTF 50%, 104lp/mm at MTF 80%. To meet or beat that 230lp/mm at 80% MTF, you'll need about an f1.2 lens.
In short, no such better lens is going to exist for a 35mm camera, period. The only way to really take advantage of 120Mpixels is to go to medium format digital. Hasselblad already sells a 60Mpixel digital back.
All a micro-lens can do for you is make a smaller sensor seem to occupy the full sensor-cell space available to it. So if you have a 2.2mm x 2.2mm sensor site (as in this 120MPixel example), the micro lens gives you the effect of a 2.2mm x 2.2mm sensor, even if in the actual silicon, it's smaller.
However, you can't steal light from your neighbors. Compare this to a Canon 5D Mk II sensor... the pixel pitch on this model is 6.4mm x 6.4mm. That's nearly 8.5x the area per pixel. There's absolutely nothing a microlens can do to make this any better for the 120Mpixel sensor.