Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Digital Cameras & Shooting Techniques => Topic started by: Stef_T on January 02, 2005, 12:45:24 pm
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I agree with you pom, that it seems like digital has nowhere more to go. However, what i am saying is that we have made this mistake before with computers. 10 years ago, no one would image we need a 1ghz processor, now, people are talking about dual 2.5ghz. I simply believe that digital will continue evolving, and getting better for many more (more then 10) years to come. I agree that digital photography is at such a point where, one is very happy with its results, however down the road, things will change.
Also, being a pro photographer, you have the problem of having to meet your clients needs. That, above all else, will keep the digital line moving and improving. Your clients, I am sure, want the best, which unfortunately means gettubg the latest technology. In 5 years, your clients will look and say: 'what, you're still using a 10D, we can get 1Ds preformance at the same price.' You will then have no choice, but either lower your price substantially, or upgrade your equipement to meet your cleint's standards. So even if in your mind, your photographs are perfect, it is your client's view that counts.
As the professional digital SLRs evolve, then they will eventually pull up the amateur, advanced and entry-level digicams as well. I don't believe that we shall see the end of this evolving cycle, for quite some time.
Stefan
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for an aperture giving the same depth of field on prints in which the subject appears at the same size, those prints also have the same diffraction spot size
Yes, no one has contested this. However, the more pixels you have in the affected area, the more noticeable any artifacts are and the more noticeable degraded resolution is. The lens projects exactly the same thing on the image plane no matter what, but the more resolution the image plane has for capture, the more conspicuous any defects will be. You're not just getting your image sharper, but you're also seeing your defects better.
I guess you'll have to base any of your camera buying decisions on your understanding and me on mine. I won't buy a 1ds2 but I will get a medium format digital camera as soon as feasible because I'm convinced that 22 Mpixels of MF sensor will not only give much more effective resolution than 16 Mpixels of 35mm sensor, but also better DOF and diffraction performance, relative to the sensor real estate, not relative to pure lens optics considerations.
If you happen to be an optics and sensor design engineer I'll defer to the greater understanding you would almost certainly have. If you're just another guy with a grab bag education for all this sort of stuff, well, maybe my grab bag is just as good.
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To get the thread back on track, here's something to consider.
There are broadly 3 sources of noise in digital cameras, (1) Photon noise (photonic shot noise), (2) pre-amplifier noise, (3) dark current (thermally generated noise).
Of these 3 sources, photonic noise (random arrival of photons) we can do nothing about. It's a constraint of the laws of physics, a bit like diffraction is in lenses.
However, because photonic noise is equal to the square root of the signal, we can arrange for it to be less significant by making bigger pixels that receive larger signals, which is the general idea of large format.
Consider a really big pixel on a large format sensor that can absorb, say 1 million photons. Photonic noise will be 1,000 photons or 0.1% of the total signal.
Consider a really small pixel that can absorb only 1000 photons to maximum well capacity. Square root of a thousand is 32. Photonic noise is 3.2% of the signal. A big difference.
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Can software improvments (ie post processing in the camera or raw converter), overcome flaws and errors,and subsequently remold the data, to provide a higher quality output.
Google "Neat Image" or "Noise Ninja" and you'll find well-established products than do exactly this, on converted images. ACR, C1, and most other RAW converters have some kind of noise reduction built in as well.
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And how exactly is reflecting that anger back at us going to help? And what does Nostradamus have to do with it? I don't recall him as a vehement example of someone who's only contribution to development is arguing something will never happen.
3-5 years is perhaps a little short, but I wouldn't be surprised if we'll end up with any of the following:
1. a computer controlled plasma lens allowing perfect focussed, non-deformed image projections across the entire magnetic spectrum.
2. a sensor containing just microlenses on each pixel, not needing any lens at all.
3. Photon Alignment algorithms.
4. single Photon detectors, which simply resample the image as much as is required to calculate photon ratios per sample, in a timespan that's well below any current ISO-exposure setting. The latter by the way will for sure be something of the past.
Or a combination of the above. If we simply detect the wave/photon pattern of the scene we want to capture, we can later calculate the desired DOF, sharpness, blur etc in postprocessing from the data. Even stereoscopic images would be possible in post, as well as a limited amount of 3D rotation.
And in 3-5 years I can still see Didger shoot with a 1DsMK3 because the increase in resolution simply translates in better and more detailed colorrendition. The 16MPix were single color, 12 useful bits pixels. The new 32MPix sensor will deliver true 16bit color for the same 16MPix previously, and even at 32MPix will deliver more depth in dynamic range etc. well beyond the diminishing returns mentioned. The lens limit btw is not a binary limit, so the increase in resolution may still enable a progressively sharper image, regardless of using the best lenses or not.
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Realistically there can't be $10 worth of material in a lens. Some glass, some metal. A bit of paint. (OK, I don't really don't know about the $10 figure, but it can't be much.)
Actually, I believe that some of the raw materials, such as special low dispersion optical glass, are themselves very expensive, especially for telephoto lenses. There is also such a thing as a maximum potential market for an item like a heavy, wide angle, single focal length lens, which gives a minimum price needed to cover fixed costs like R&D and tooling for production, regardless of how low unit production costs can be driven.
As soon as there is genuine competition (for the lenses or for the optical glass, often bought from outside suppliers), it defies the working of market forces to suggest that any sucessful company could increase profits by substantially decreasing prices. If that were true, one or more competitors would already have done it.
(Blame me for the quote, not Jonathon.)
Points taken.
If I wanted to be defensive/argumentative I could say that even that exotic glass started out as a shovelful of sand.
But I won't be that way.... :)
It can well be that producing the needed glass requires some manufacturing steps that drive up the price. But I'd guess not as much as is reflected in the price differential between Zeiss/'L' lenses and the 'affordables'.
To some extent those higher prices can be (at least) temporarily maintained if the manufacturer has locked in the patent on some particular process/exotic coating/....
And in economics the term 'excessive profits' is used when the the profits are sufficiently high to cause other suppliers to enter the market. Maybe one of the old high-quality film companies will rise from the 'almost dead' in partnership with a deep pockets company....
I'm just thinking that we're going to have a lot more high quality lenses at better-than-today prices hit the market in the next 5-10 years.
Do you ever remember anyone complaining about some Canon Ls weren't that good back in the days of film?
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Its a 6 megapixel camera then. And not what I'm looking for.
The S3 is a 6 megapixel camera with an arrangement of hexagonal pixels that allow better interpolation. The equivalent resolution is somewhere in between 6 MP and 12MP. There's a thread somewhere on this forum in which the resolution of the S3 was compared to the 8MP 20D and found to be slightly less.
I'd expect the interpolated 12mp of the S3 to be roughly on a par with the 20D.
I don't think the presence of the 6m R pixels justifies a 12mp designation because they are operating at a different level. Where the S pixels leave off, the R pixels take over. There needs to be some overlap, but essentially from 0-255 the image is described by 6 megapixels, before interpolation.
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"In 5 years, your clients will look and say: 'what, you're still using a 10D, we can get 1Ds preformance at the same price."
IMHO and experience, clients don't usually care what gear you use, just as long as your results satisfy their needs. (ad agency suits/wannabees notwithstanding)
A few years agon I had a new client look askance at my new digital camcorder, one with which I was about to shoot a three month job for him. I wound up doing over three years continuous work for that client, all with the same camera.
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Do you think that a 16.7 Mpixel 8x10 back would give you the same diffraction and DOF constraints as a 16.7 Mpixel 35mm sensor? If that were true, then 8x10 film would be similarly constrained and useless.
Didger,
perhaps the problem is that there are advantages to larger film formats, in areas like resolution and finer tonal gradations, but just not in the DOF/diffraction trade-offs that you are talking about. Perhaps I should make peace with fans of larger formats by publishing my list of their legitimate inherent advantages, with physical reasons.
In answer to your quoted question, I not only think so, but can prove mathematically what I stated before: that for an aperture giving the same depth of field on prints in which the subject appears at the same size, those prints also have the same diffraction spot size; changing focal length or format or cropping has no effect.
But this is far from showing that 8x10 format film has no advantage over smaller film formats, because DOF and diffraction are not the only relevant factors: other obvious ones are the resolution of the lenses and the film, and finer tonal gradations, a cousin of greater dynamic range. I have already mentioned the likely lens advantage of larger formats, so I will just comment on film emulsions.
Since the same emulsions can be used in any format, a study at the PhotoDo website suggests that the spatial resolution of 35mm format is often constrained by emulsions, while in large format, lenses are usually the main limit. Indeed, whenever DOF needs force the 8x10 user to apertures smaller than f/22, diffraction is a far greater limit on resolution that modern film emulsions.
If 8x10 at small apertures like f/32 has an advantage over MF or 4x5 at aperture ratios giving the same DOF, it is probably largely from aspects like the finer tonal gradations achieved with the lower degree of enlargment needed. This is physically related to the lower signal to noise ratio of a larger format, which measures the number of distinguishable luminosity levels, though the S/N jargon tends not to be used when discussing emulsions.
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Yeah, sensor chip size is inherently limited by this very thing you point out and I just don't believe in any future breakthrough miracle cure for ultradense noise resistant sensors. Computer chip densities also have some ultimate ceiling due to things like cosmic radiation hits and quantum level randomness. We can shield expensive enough computers with lead, but you can't very well shield camera sensor from stray radiations producing noise.
Along with these inherent sensor noise problems with more and more component density, there's also the problem of needing to make better and better lenses. Again, the frequently expressed optimism that these better lenses are right around the corner is in no way backed by anything real. There's not even any ultrawides being manufactured right now for any Nikon or Canon camera that are as good as the old Zeiss and Leica designs. Design and manufacturing tolerances need to get tighter and tighter to produce these miracle lenses for miracle sensors. Sample variation is pretty well out of control now even relative to existing (1ds, 1ds2) sensors. Where is there any grounds for optimism that there will be lenses to adequately match 1dsMKIII sensors or 1.6x sensors of ever higher sensor site densities? It's all fantasies. The only way upward is medium format, and hopefully some day 4x5 digital.
I expect that present day 4x5 film will be nearly reached with MF digital sensors and vastly exceeded with 4x5 digital, but small sensor cameras aren't going anywhere much farther than they are right now.
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Would it be possible at one shutter-speed/f-stop setting to somehow sample the incoming light twice? Or even to take the shot twice, but so quickly that the photographer wouldn't notice?
It would appear to be possible. Shutter speed and aperature wouldn't have to change. Turn up the amp' for the second shot (ISO) and have the capture run back to back with the original exposure.
Would require a steady platform. I have no idea how long it takes the chip to dump the data for the second calculation to start.
Issues, exposure timed is doubled +, noise on higher iso exposure, and getting a manufacture to make it work.
Degree Physics 1969. I was and am still thinking Newton, all this string theory stuff is beyond me. As is all this "light" stuff.
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It'll be funny to look at this thread in about 3-5 years, and see how accurate our predictions for the future were.
Yeah, and you'll be marveling that Didger knew all along that there would be no ultra high quality little tiny lenses for ultradense little tiny sensors and that the future would be larger sensors for pro quality higher resolutions. D2X and 1dsMKII are close to efficient max (if not a bit over). Wedding, sports action, and news shooters have more than enough resolution now and price drops and quality improvements will be the main further progress. Landscape photographers will switch to larger formats in droves as more options and lower prices become available. Nikon and Canon will lose much of the pro market, probably all of the landscape pro market, if they don't wise up. D2X is a pointless offering because it won't be nearly as good as 1ds and 1ds is now available for less money. That prediction will be verifiable soon. 1dsMKII's will never sell a lot and they'll be cheap on ebay much faster than 1ds got cheap because it's not enough upgrade for the bux for news, wedding, and sports and a stop-gap measure and poor investment and upgrade dead end for landscape. I'll be switching to MF soonest while others are waiting for small format sci-fi miracles.
Didger also said 30 years ago (and even 40) that the new millenium would offer no believable artificial intellegence or simulations of living organisms. He got much irate argument from those AI geniuses at Stanford University (where I used to sell my electronic music albums on campus), but those marvels are still limited to sci-fi even though computer speed, memory, and storage have exceeded anyone's wildest imaginations and at dirt cheap prices. Artificial life and self awareness won't be here in 100 or 1000 years either. They probably laughed at Nostradamus too (and even Alfred E. Neuman).
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As soon as there is genuine competition (for the lenses or for the optical glass, often bought from outside suppliers), it defies the working of market forces to suggest that any sucessful company could increase profits by substantially decreasing prices. If that were true, one or more competitors would already have done it.
That's true, unless you also decrease costs. I'm often amazed at how inexpensive some of the goods are that are made in mainland China, just as I'm sometimes amazed at the high mark-up on other items.
I don't believe China makes any really high quality camera lenses at present. However, if the general trend in anything to go by, I see no reason why it will not happen.
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Ray,
have you seen tests using best practice conversion of RAW output from the S3? I cannot see any way that the sensor can be indicted as a failure without doing that;
BJL,
The only tests of the S3 I've seen that used RAW conversions are Michael's test in his review. Didn't he use a beta version of C1 V3.6 for the S3, the 20D and the 1Ds ll?
Here's a quote from that review:-
There is no question that Fuji's dual sensor technology produces a slightly / somewhat (choose your preferred adjective) bit more dynamic range. But, when it comes to working with the files in Photoshop I find that even minor use of levels and curves, and especially exposure compensation in the Raw converter, tends to dilute the distinctions.
It seems that Fuji have used a different approach to achieve a very competitive DR for their camera, but have trumpeted their different design with a great deal of fanfare to imply that it's a major breakthrough and a revolutionary concept, when in practice it's a rather small incremental improvement.
I'm not trying to say the camera is a failure, but just searching for a reason why the improvement in DR is not as great in practice as it would appear to be on paper.
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To be honest, I must say that I disagree that digital photography is going to reach a point where it stops getting better. Unfortunately, it is the camera manufacturers that control this and it is not in their best interest to speed technology ahead as fast as possible. Manufacturers first resonsability is to the shareholders, to make big returns on their investments, unfortunately, we, the customers are next in line. Canon, for instance, their main priority is to make a profit. They know perfectly well that if they make a camera that litteraly can’t be beat, even by themselves, then they will continue to product that camera for a long time, without replacing it. Like it has been previously mentioned, manufacturers make their money off of several products and a diverse market, which they would lose if they made a body that couldn’t be beat.
Now this is why, we have the concept of monopoly, and that no one company can control an entire market, but lets face it, Canon is running away from pretty much anyone. Chances are that they won’t be cought for a long time. Eventually, they will probably get cocky and make some bad products in a row, allowing for Nikon and such to catch up, but this, I am guessing, is at least 5-10 years down the road.
Do I think that digital photography will reach a plateau: yes, it will, but it will be a very short one, followed by another quick steep rise. Technology is so diverse that manucacturers will always find something new and better to add to their cameras. The same thing was said about PCs. Bill Gates once said that, no person will even need more then 128 Kbytes of memory (not sure if that is the exact number). Now, with photography, if you have a PC will less then 1GB, then you are hopelessly lost. If computers are any indication, then digital cameras will continue to get better, and we, the consumers, will continue to be amazed by how better things have gotten and will will continue to dish out the cash for them.
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P. S. About my qualifications
OK, you've got me outdone in qualifications. Mine are similar level, but in biology, not math/physics. At this point I can't understand why larger format large size prints look so much better than smaller formats, but they sure do and DOF is not noticeably reduced in David Muench prints or Michael Fatali (8x10). If 22 Mpixel MF is no better for DOF or diffraction than 22 Mpixel 35mm would be, then nothing would ever be sharp in a large print, except stuff shot at f8 and with no DOF challenge at all. Large format would be even worse and using equivalent films would be no different from using equivalent sensor densities. So, how do medium and large format folks ever get pictures that are not seriously compromised by diffraction and extremely narrow DOF? Why do medium and large format large prints look so much better than 35mm? What good is it to have all that extra resolution if almost everything is out of focus if you shoot at large apertures due to extremely limited DOF or small apertures due to diffraction? In the middle you'd have extremely limited DOF and diffraction.
There's a serious conflict between real life and math here, sort of like bumblebees being poorly designed for flight.
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Wouldn't all of Didger's problems be solved if he just got in his truck and backed up a couple of miles?
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I assume from this that you found the print satisfactory?
Did you take a look at the CD included with the print?
I gather you didn't check your regular email recently. I sent you an email practically the minute I opened the package. I didn't look at the CD, though. No need for the time being. I doubt that I'll be making more prints of any sort for quite some time.
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Google "Neat Image" or "Noise Ninja" and you'll find well-established products than do exactly this, on converted images. ACR, C1, and most other RAW converters have some kind of noise reduction built in as well.
Jonathan,
I was thinking more along the idea of adding predictable information between the data sites (pixels). I have a projector with a line 4 X multiplier. It takes each scan line and then adds data based upon fairly complex algorithims as to that is the most likely data is between each line (and data point in the scan.
It produces a remarkable experience.
The software I see out there is a start, but with number crunching power possibly even more capable processing can be performed with the convenience of being inside the camera. Fewer data points can create higher quality output. Some of what I am talking about is probably happening now. With more cpu and creative invention, it could happen.
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And how exactly is reflecting that anger back at us going to help?
Huh? Are you operating in some alternate Universe? What in the world (this one) are you talking about? Anger?
Your technical speculations are utterly incomprehensible to me and beyond even Sci-Fi, but maybe I'm just too dumb to understand (in this Universe, anyway).
And in 3-5 years I can still see Didger shoot with a 1DsMK3
I reckon not. I reckon I'll be shooting 1ds, MF digital, and maybe 4x5 digital.
And what does Nostradamus have to do with it? I don't recall him as a vehement example of someone who's only contribution to development is arguing something will never happen.
Again, I can't imagine what world you live in if you took light hearted whimsy and humor at literal face value and if you saw anything "vehement" or angry in my message at all. I'm surprised you didn't find some serious intent in my "Alfred E. Neuman" reference. Did you forget to wake up this morning before starting your day's activities?
Only time will tell about all these predictions and I can't imagine any reason to take any of this so seriously; a little break from image processing while it's too rainy, snowy, and cold to be out shooting.
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Realistically there can't be $10 worth of material in a lens. Some glass, some metal. A bit of paint. (OK, I don't really don't know about the $10 figure, but it can't be much.)
Yeah, right. And a Pentium CPU has 5 cents worth of silicon (melted sand) in it. What a rip-off...
Gosh, Johnathan. I do believe that you are correct.
You're probably not old enough to remember when a refrigerator-sized computer with a grand total of 16k RAM cost ~$28,000 are you.
Those old PDP-8Es probably only had three cents worth of silicon in them.
It isn't amazing what demand and volume production can accomplish?
(You got a burr in your saddle?)
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Stef, there is a limit in how good a camera needs to be.
Even if we get to the point where you can get Large Format quality images from a 1Ds mark X, it would probably be so unecessary that the manufacturers will never bother to make it.
I started with MF Canon and have worked my way up through to a 10D with a detour to Mamiya along the way.
If I honestly look at my 10D now and say, "what does this camera lack for my photography, both for my wedding and landscape work". I won't hold any futuristic bars on my fantasy.
Lets see,
FF, 16-22 megapixels of resolution with incredible noise control, Instant response and write times, Dual card slot for redundancy, DR of B&W film minimum, a LCD which will be bright and clear in the strongest sunshine and is colour and exposure accurate, IS and anti-dust mechanism on the sensor, perfect ETTL flash control, much better ergonomics of the body, ability to focus anywhere in the viewfinder, silent mirror/shutter, AEB over 5 stops, mirror lock up switch and a #### switch to change from One Shot to AI Servo etc
How many years until a body like this becomes standard at an affordable price? Some of those features are already in the 1Ds mark II, what more would I need for convenience when taking photos before it starts getting unecessarily silly?
In the old fashioned 'film' days, top pro bodies were updated only once every 5-10 years or so. the 1N-1V, the F5-F6, and these upgrades were not in any way drastic, slightly better this, added compatability with that....
I have no doubt that within the next 5-10 years the DSLR world will slow down to this pace of upgrades, who wants video or 3D in a pro DSLR anyway?
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the more pixels you have in the affected area, the more noticeable any artifacts are and the more noticeable degraded resolution is.
I thought that we were discussing equal pixel counts in different formats. If so, increasing the focal length in proportion to the sensor size to get the same FOV means that you get the same degree of enlargement of
- the image size
- each circle of confusion
- each diffraction spot, and
- the photosites.
Thus, once you output the image at the same size, everything we have been talking about is the same: DOF, diffraction, and output pixel density (print or monitor PPI).
You do not have "more pixels in the affected area", since the area containing any given part of the image, or any given circle of confusion or diffraction spot, increases in proportion to sensor area and pixel area, and so contains the same number of pixels.
Reverting to my teleconverter comparison, the TC needed to increase the image size with equal aperture diameter for the larger format, larer pixel sensor simply spreads the light that previously went to one photosite on the smaller sensor over one larger photosite on the larger sensor: it is a "pixel perfect enlargement".
I am not inclined to accept the cop-out of "my understanding vs your understanding"; I am making precise, mathematically verifiable statements of fact that follow from basic optical physics, supported by arguments in various previous posts; you seem to be simply asserting beliefs.
P. S. About my qualifications: I am a professor of applied mathematics, and publish in mathematics and physics journals on topics related to wave propagation, so vaguely related to the topic at hand. The questions at hand only depend on the lens optics and geometry that I learnt as an undergraduate, not the internal physics of sensors.
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Looking at 100% will of course show up any problems, but then who the heck prints that big?
David Muench, Michael Fatali, and as soon as at all feasible, Didger. If you want to hang onto your satisfaction with smaller prints and not quite maximum sharpness, by all means try to avoid Muench or Fatali exhibits. Galen Rowell prints look mighty fine if not in the same room as David Muench prints. I know which direction I want to go, regardless of cost.
How about win, win, lose: the larger format gear is still likely to be heavier and more expensive, and with a smaller range of lens choices, less sopisticated automation of focus exposure and such.
I meant for me, not for some average of all photographers. Medium format is clearly NOT heavier than a 1ds kit. The Mamiya ZD weighs a bit less than a 1ds body and the lenses I'm interested in weigh no more than what I have now for my 1ds. I don't care about fewer choices. For what I want there's clearly better MF lenses than any made for eos. I hate all automation and don't use any of it even for those lenses I have that allow it. The only "lose" part of the whole formula is that the money is a big problem. The camera will almost certainly be available before the money is for me.
it is not clear to me that the best Canon and Nikon primes cannot benefit from improved sensor resolution.
But that will always remain true to a certain extent, no matter how pixel dense sensors get. You reach a point of diminishing returns, however. 1ds already shows this and the returns for most lenses have diminished dramatically with 1ds2. The storage and processing overhead of much larger files remains fully undiminished no matter how diminished the desireable returns get and the upgrade costs also remain full on and undiminished.
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This poor thread. It's been dragged in so many directions it's now permanently deformed.
Howard,
Fatali was busted for lighting fires around Delicate Arch in Utah to do night photography. He used duraflame logs in aluminum foil pans. The pans burned through and some scaring of the rock occurred.
I think it was a very original and creative idea. I don't think it makes him a bad person and I'm sure he didn't mean to cause any harm.
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A question for you people who know about physics and light & so on (I was a history major):
Would it be possible at one shutter-speed/f-stop setting to somehow sample the incoming light twice? Or even to take the shot twice, but so quickly that the photographer wouldn't notice? Say that a compromise setting in a scene with a wide range of light values suggests 1/250 at f8, so the camera shoots one at f8 at 1/500 and one at 1/125, at an interval of 1/1000. So the whole shot takes, say 11/1000 of a second. Would it then be possible to register the two shots to different chips or sequentially to the same chip, with the software then sorting the resulting two shots into one shot with a very long range?
JC
As BJL pointed out some forms of this have been tried.
However, there are severe limitations on how fast data can be read from the Sensor (Canon probably has the fastest read out rate in the 1DII shifting 8Mpixels at up to 8.5fps). Because of the size of the silicon area and the need to limit power consumption the maximum clock speed that the sensor can operate is some 70Mhz (or thereabouts - though I'm not too sure on this figure). To take two pictures 1,000th of a second apart is just not physically possible with current sensor technologies as the data from the first image could not be read from the sensor quick enough.
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Let's say the camera takes 3-6 quick exposures to get the 'blend' shots.
Isn't this the problem? No quick exposure can capture detail in the shadows. If you want to blend images, you need one long exposure, one medium exposure and one quick exposure. Total time is one very long exposure.
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Realistically there can't be $10 worth of material in a lens. Some glass, some metal. A bit of paint. (OK, I don't really don't know about the $10 figure, but it can't be much.)
Actually, I believe that some of the raw materials, such as special low dispersion optical glass, are themselves very expensive, especially for telephoto lenses. There is also such a thing as a maximum potential market for an item like a heavy, wide angle, single focal length lens, which gives a minimum price needed to cover fixed costs like R&D and tooling for production, regardless of how low unit production costs can be driven.
As soon as there is genuine competition (for the lenses or for the optical glass, often bought from outside suppliers), it defies the working of market forces to suggest that any sucessful company could increase profits by substantially decreasing prices. If that were true, one or more competitors would already have done it.
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You might want to wait for the D2X to hit the streets and see what that holds for you. Having gone through the system change route in the past (Canon to Nikon for the D1 ... ouch), I'd be wary of jumping systems unless you're absolutely certain that you can justify it financially and from a workflow/experience/familiarity perspective.
I'm beginning to think that we're rapidly reaching a point of little incremental improvement with the latest round of top end DSLR's. You're getting great colour, enough resolution for uninterpolated 13x19's, superior dynamic range to any film, clean shadows and incredibly low noise at ever faster ISO's.
What might be more interesting to watch is how lens technology is forced to improve so that everyone is producing glass optimized for digital resolution that puts even the best Zeiss glass to the test. I'd expect there to be a lot more activity in this arena given the 'problems' that are arising with the full frame DSLR's and existing film optimized prime glass.
Or maybe not ....
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****Have you had a secret sneak preview of ZD, and found it lacking?****
No. I've seen the 1Ds II and know Mamiya can't match it. Can't even come close. I will bet you $100 right now that the general consensus on the ZD camera (not the back) with in 6 months of it's hitting the retail market ... is very ho hum. Pretty much as it is for the kodak DSLR.
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Hhmm! I should use my Fuji GSW690lll with fixed 65mm lens equivalent to 35mm format 28mm. The Fujinon f5.6 lens is very sharp. I should really use this camera more often but the thought of messing around with film, buying it, getting it developed, scanning it etc is simply offputting.
But I'm going to make a real effort next time I go out bush. :D
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If the concern about Canon's lack of competition is centered on the belief that Canon's EOS-1D series sensors are so superior to all the competition that there is no effective competition, then I would not worry. Sensor technology is still advancing rapidly, companies like Sony (and probably Kodak) have far greater resources and expertise in sensors as a whole than does Canon, and Sony in particular has grand ambitions to maintain and extend its dominant position in the sensor market (including about half of the DSLR sensor market).
So if the market wants it, I expect that there will sooner or later be competition for Canon's high end DSLR sensors, from vendors like Sony and Kodak who are happy to supply multiple SLR makers. (For all we know, "sooner" could mean the arrival of the D2X.)
Also, do not believe what is sometimes said about Canon having some unique capability to make 24x36mm 35mm sized sensors, or having some unique cost advantage in fabrication despite being a relatively new, small player in the semi-conductor manufacturing business.
The actual fabrication of 24x36mm sensors can be handled by numerous chip makers; for example, the sensors for the Kodak 14/n and SLR/* models have been made by two small sub-contractors that you have probably never heard of, first Tower Semi-conductor in Israel and now a UK company.
The reason why Nikon, Pentax et al do not make 35mm format DSLRs is not an inability to scale up their currently used sensor designs to 35mm format; it is simply a business decision that such cameras would be a too expensive and low volume market sector to pursue, at least for now.
By the way, Nikon has stated production estimates for the D2X that roughly match the total of stated D1 and D1S production (which is still a small number, about 6,000/month). So either Nikon is run by idiots or liars, or the EOS-1 digital models do not utterly and ireversibly dominate the professional DSLR market.
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****The fact is that today's best ultrawide lenses are not as good as those old Zeiss and Leica designs and there is no particular reason (except blind optimism) to think that there's any lens miracles in store any time soon.****
I suspect that the prohibition on certain optical glass elements is the problem. We now get "environmentally friendly" lenses that we pay more for that cannont equal the old glass.
Makes me think of the Space Shuttle. They went to environmentally safe foam and killed a shuttle load of astronauts for it. I'm sure those twice a year launches that were the ONLY use for that foam were a true danger to the planet.
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Maybe better better "glass" will not be glass.
I think we're already there to some extent. A ceramic material has been developed that has more resolving power than glass and has less of a CA problem. Casio has already produced a compact with a ceramic lens.
If I understand the optics this will lead to smaller, lighter, better performing wide angle lenses. And it may lead to some truly wide lenses for half-frames and smaller sensor cameras.
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Wouldn't it be fairly simple (conceptually, at least) to create a moveable back for 35mm that would resolve a lot of DOF problems?
Conceptually at least creating a movable back, yes, why not. If it can be done for LF, there's no conceptual barriers for DSLR's, but the mechanics might get pretty nasty and pretty expensive and make a 1ds still bigger and heavier. This would NOT resolve a lot of DOF problems in any case, only for things like architectural shots where everything is mostly simple flat surfaces. I have some TS lenses and for something like the side of a house, or a flat sidewalk, or a relatively straight canyon wall, it's fabulous for increasing apparent DOF. For a forest where you want near and far trees all in focus it would be completely useless. You'd get get the bottoms of the nearer trees and the ground near your feet in better focus but nothing else.
All the fascinating and cool sensor ideas will depend on vastly better processing speeds, but that's inevitably coming. The entire global computer industry is driving that, not just the little camera sector.
Unfortunately, the various tricks for miniaturizing and speeding up electronic chips don't apply to lens design and manufacturing. You can print electronic chips almost as easily as postage stamps (OK, a little exaggerated, but you get the idea). Lenses are immensly complicated in all phases of manufacturing and quality control).
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Sfleming, I'm lost. Help me.
I met Fatali personally and I think he is a jerk, IMUO. I doubt he even remembers me. No big deal though.
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A question for you people who know about physics and light & so on (I was a history major):
Would it be possible at one shutter-speed/f-stop setting to somehow sample the incoming light twice? Or even to take the shot twice, but so quickly that the photographer wouldn't notice? Say that a compromise setting in a scene with a wide range of light values suggests 1/250 at f8, so the camera shoots one at f8 at 1/500 and one at 1/125, at an interval of 1/1000. So the whole shot takes, say 11/1000 of a second. Would it then be possible to register the two shots to different chips or sequentially to the same chip, with the software then sorting the resulting two shots into one shot with a very long range?
JC
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Maybe I was wrong. When you buy a 20mm Canon lens, you will very very likey get a 20mm Canon lens. You get exactly what you paid for. The lens was offered at a price, and you accept. No fraud.
But how good is that lens? Anywhere from very good to not so good. If it is way better than average (and it might be), you likely won't offer to pay more. If it is much less than average, and want a new one, Canon will likely give you one. But I expect it will be just another one - not a super item Canon is saving for you.
Imprecise? Yes. But then does Canon say your new 20mm lens will be definably good? Or just you will be satisfied (however you define that)? Because I haven't purchased a Conon lens ib over 25 years, I actually don't know what their "satisfaction" guarentee is.
But I suspect you get the idea. If you want a peach everytime, it will cost you. Someone must pay for the lemons, and it isn't Canon.
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Price is determined by other factors than quality. If I could make a lens as good as a Zeiss, it would likely be too expensive to sell, or I would have to lose money on it.
Well, we know that lenses as good as a Zeiss can be made.
So given enough market demand one of the manufactures is going to revise their manufacturing process to crank out a flow of them.
Whether some people like it or not there is likely to be market pressure to cram more than 8 megs on a half-frame, more than 16 on a full-. That cramming is likely to increase the number of people who demand better glass.
If lenses are computer ground, computer assembled, and computer tested at each step in the process then we don't need to pay for the expensive hand-made lenses of the past. The volume just has to be high enough to cover R&D/tooling up. Plus a bit of profit, of course.
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That's true, unless you also decrease costs. I'm often amazed at how inexpensive some of the goods are that are made in mainland China, just as I'm sometimes amazed at the high mark-up on other items.
I don't believe China makes any really high quality camera lenses at present. However, if the general trend in anything to go by, I see no reason why it will not happen.
China has an advantage when the labor content of a product is significant. When the product is manufactured and assembled by machinery they don't compete as well. I doubt there is much labor content (relatively) with the high end of the market lenses. In some cases low cost labor can be substituted for expensive production machinery. Other factors also come into play, delivery times or freight for example. Nevertheless, China, holding wages artificially low, will be troublesome for all of us someday if not corrected by free market forces.
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To keep the load light I want to use a medium format view camera (6x7 or 6x9) ... the current scanning back is smaller than 4x5 and with some design and production adjustments can work in a small format view camera.
Since I am fairly sure that digital sensors will overall be smaller than their film counterparts and that single shot sensors will not go beyond 645 format, and larger format photography often has little in the way of speed constraints so that scanning backs can give the best price/performance, I expect that there is a niche for scanning digital view cameras in formats like 6x7 and 6x8. For example, the Fuji GX680 might have an interesting digital future.
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To take two pictures 1,000th of a second apart is just not physically possible with current sensor technologies ...
Yes, but from the little I have read about the Stanford research, there are possible new sensor technologies that could overcome this.
Anyway, the Fuji SR idea is clearly the one to watch for now. For one thing, it works with existing focal plane shutters while the other ideas do not. (I think of SR as simultaneously recording two images, one through an ND filter.)
P. S. I just found this reference mentioned in another thread, on a related dynamic range enhancement method being offered commercially for surveillance video cameras. One quote suggests that this is related to what I mention above: "Building upon technology developed at Stanford University in the 1990s, Pixim has created an image capture and processing system that provides high-quality pictures with enhanced dynamic range."
http://www.pixim.com/technology/technology.phtml (http://www.pixim.com/technology/technology.phtml)
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To make smaller less noisy sensor sites and higher resolving lenses we will have to await a breakthrough in nano technology. That could be tomorrow or in 50 years depending who you read.
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Of couse we save in film, but then didn't we charge the film costs to the client anyway? we sure arn't charging the computer time...
Speak for yourself. If you aren't, you should be...
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For those interested in narrow-angle mosaic photos, and haven't seen it, look at this:
http://www.tpd.tno.nl/smartsite966.html (http://www.tpd.tno.nl/smartsite966.html)
(This is the Delft photo; I suspect many have already seen it. I was amazed to click on the tower in the far background and being able to see the clock face and tell what time the photo was shot. Also, there are numberous artifacts in the streets, like half-buses. But this technique hold the possibility of printing enormous photographs that will resolve down to loupe level.)
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From a satellite 100Km up, that resolution limit at 50% MTF would be about one line pair per 14 meters. With the far lower MTF needed to barely resolve text, the graphs suggest a limit of about 20,000 lp/radian, still 5 meters per line pair.
Maybe on a very clear day they can see grapefruit, on the top of a mountain above all the dust and heat haze!
From what I recall, such satellites often have a distinct orbit, bringing them as close as 30-40 km from the ground in extreme cases. But that's still nowhere near good enough to look at license plates lying flat on the ground.
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John, I don't think that I am going to help solve your dilema, I have the same problem, deciding whether to wait, or to get something now. However, on the topic of what you want, and how good something is, let me tell you a short story.
This is a true story, that happened, or rather I saw, durring the summer, a year ago, about 2 minutes walk from my house in Toronto. I was crossing the street, when I car pulls up on the red light. it was a brand new corvette, driven by a young teenager, I'm guessing that he was 19, no more then 21. He thinks that he is 'all that'. Listeing to lound rap music, rocking his head, arm up on the driver's seat. We lock eyes for a second, and I get the impression that he is telling me 'haha, you wish you were me!' Now a corvette is a very nice car, and I wish I have one even though I can't drive yet, but here's the good part of the story, and remember this actually happened: Beside the corvette drives up a red Ferrari, driven by an older man, probably in his 40s. I don't exactly remember what Ferrari it was, It might even have been an F50, tho my memory is a bit hazy on that fact. The teenager in the Corvette looks over, and it was like his heart skipped a beat. His face was as pall as snow. He litterally, turned off his music, and sunk so low in his chair, that I could no longer see him. He couldn't blieve that the car beside him, was so much better then his. AS the light turned green, the Corvette was a little slower going off then the Ferrari, the kid was obviously still shaken after being showed up in such a way.
Now, I know that had nothing to do directly with photography, but the moral remains the same in both cases. No matter what you get, how much you spend, there will always be something better, that your equipement will look like crap compared to. in that moment you would do anything to have that better equipment, but you can't. All you can have is the knowledge, that one day, even that equipment will be outdone, will get old and will look bad compared to something newer and better.
The moral of all this: don't worry so much about the future, and if someone else's equipment will be better then yours or he got a better deal on it. Life's too short to wait, get the best that you can now, and enjoy it. If you simply save up your money waiting forever, you will die a very rich, lonely and sad man.
Carpa Diem, Stefan Tarnawsky
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I realize the 24x36 sensor has it's limits in megapixels. Maybe once 35mm reaches 22mp, things will slow down a bit, and Medium Format will begin to develop more rapidly.
The problem is not so much that 24x36 sensors have pixel density limits (who knows what those limits might prove to be?), but that even now, with 16.7MP, the bottleneck is lens quality. Even for 11MP, very few lenses keep up. For 16.7, perhaps NO lenses really keep up. For 22MP, what's the point? I can't believe there will ever be a 22MP 24x36 sensor unless there's a very dramatic breakthrough in lens technology. I see no hint of this happening. Modern lenses are on the whole not even as good as those old Leica and Zeiss designs, so where are these miracle lenses for ultra high density sensor cameras supposed to come from.
1dsMKII is a sort of a stopgap measure. The real step up will have to be medium format. As to whether Mamiya is qualified; I'd bet yes, but until the camera is out and thoroughly tested, we're all just speculating. I'm surprised that some of you couch your speculations in such confident phrasing. Have you had a secret sneak preview of ZD, and found it lacking?
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That's why I mentioned the idea of a used 1Ds...
Yes, one great thing about the digital market is its robust used market. Photography has enough early adopters that for those with a little patience, many deals can be had. (Although for me $4K is still way too much for a body.)
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Some little upstart like Foveon could make a breakthrough but they will be bought out or forced to keep the prices high.
Foveon is manufactured under contact by National Semiconductor. Hardly a little upstart, that National Semiconductor.
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Maybe theres a different way to approach the "I want more pixels" issue.
Think back to Michael's comparison of the 1D MkII and the Pro1. Both 8 megs and if shot at lower ISO settings the quality was quite close.
The Mk II has a 24 x 36 mm sensor - a total area of 862 mm sq.
The Pro I has a 6.6 x 8.8 mm sensor - a total area of 58 mm sq.
The Pro I's sensor is only 6.7% of that of the Mk II.
Them pixels is squeezed in tight!
Seems to me there's some powerful resolving going on in the Pro I's glass. Is there something about smaller lenses that makes them better? (Or am I lost in space?)
How would a small sensor 16/24/32 meg camera perform? (The sensor might have to be larger than the Pro I's 2/3".)
(Forget high ISOs, dynamic range, and shallow DOF for the moment. I think there are solutions to these problems.)
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If someone should happen to point this message out to Michael he might just search his memory who he might have met that would call him a jerk on a public forum. Is this the way to create a kinder gentler LL? Michael Fatali is just another struggling human being doing the best he can with the hand life is dealing him. We're all "jerks" one way or another now and then. I found him fun to hang out with at his house a bit and in the field a bit and at his galleries and I find his photography and his enthusiasm for it beautiful and inspiring. I'll certainly look him up again when I get back into another big Colorado Plateau shooting phase.
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So, increasng pixel and sensor size gives you choices like
(a) less visible noise, but less DOF and/or longer exposure time ("same highlight range, better shadows, more OOF or motion blur"), and
( same DOF and shutter speed, same visible noise levels, more highlight headroom ("same shadows, more highlight range").
Can software improvments (ie post processing in the camera or raw converter), overcome flaws and errors,and subsequently remold the data, to provide a higher quality output. I know lens aberations can be mitigated, can not noise (errors) at the pixel level be ??? smoothed or reassembled.
bob
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OK, I'm trying to put all this together in my possibly-slower head.
Small photo sites would be fine if they didn't fill as quickly. (Putting the DOF issue to one side for the moment.)
Smaller photo sites would mean smaller sensors; smaller, lighter, cheaper, and easier to build lenses.
There are two possible solutions for the 'filling too quickly' problem.
First, 'back of sensor' processing. Build a CMOS chip that can either measure the amount of time that it takes the site well to fill and/or count the number of times it fills.
Dynamic range would be limited only by the minimum shutter speed that was necessary to freeze motion.
Second, take multiple readings of the sensor. For example, when the shutter was set to 1/250th the camera might actually take four 1/1,000 exposures and blend the four to achieve a very high dynamic range.
(Smart algorithms could probably detect the point at which motion blur appears and set the maximum shutter speed after the capture.)
OK, how befuddled am I?
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And the DOF issue.
First, very deep DOF works for most landscape shots. That means that a smaller sensor would be preferable.
But for those times when one wants to isolate the subject with a shallow DOF seems like you could do so with multiple, very fast exposures. (My K-M A1 has a max. electronic shutter speed of 1/16,000th second.)
Let's say the camera takes 3-6 quick exposures to get the 'blend' shots.
The it takes one or more shots on each side of 'focus' to determine which parts of the frame are closer and which are farther than the chosen focus plane.
(Sure we would need some serious buffer space and processing speed, but Moore's law is still working for non-sensor stuff....)
Now all we need is 'brokeh algorithms' and we can dial in the DOF back at home.
(Hey, I'm not a sci-fi fan so let me know if I'm drifting too far in that direction.)
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Peter, I like all your ideas and maybe most of them are even doable, but not for free. However, what are "legacy lenses" that would allow you to use 25 Mpixels effectively in 35mm format? I don't know of any lenses shorter than 35mm that can even keep up with 16 Mpixels or more than barely 11. What lenses are you talking about? If Zeiss distagon lenses are "legacy", I'm afraid you'll be disappointed in the ultrawide realm. They're OK for 11 Mpixel, but for anything over that I'll move to medium format.
Also, are you so confident that noise free 25 MPixel 35mm format can be done, or for that matter, that it can be done period?
And, yeah, shooting conditions and forecast for a few more days are not so great here.
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This discussion has been focused on the optical, mechanical and electronic technicalities of achieving maximum quality images for a given format size. Very interesting and entertaining, but what if we turned the question around? What are the MINIMUM digital camera/lens specs needed to produce an exhibition quality 16x20 print? Assume that "exhibition quality" is defined as good enough that discerning print buyers would not perceive any technical flaws in the print, at normal viewing distance, that would detract from the aesthetics of the image or their willingness to buy it. No lupes or microscopes allowed. Assume that we are talking about realistic landscape photography and not art shots that employ deliberate distortions. Also assume that the print buyers do not know what camera was used.
If this is the goal (for at least some photograhers), do they need any more than a Digital Rebel and the latest image processing software for reducing lens defects (DxO or equivalent), reducing noise (Neat Image or equivalent), upscaling (Genuine Fractals or equivalent) and sharpening (PhotoKit or equivalent)? Given the proper processing workflow, would discerning print buyers, at normal viewing distance, perceive any significant difference between a 16x20 print of a Digital Rebel image and 16x20 print of a high-end digital camera image? If so, where would the difference lie?
At what point would this photographer rationally decide that further investments in technically better gear would reduce, rather than increase, his net profit from selling 16x20 prints?
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This discussion has been focused on the optical, mechanical and electronic technicalities of achieving maximum quality images for a given format size. Very interesting and entertaining, but what if we turned the question around? What are the MINIMUM digital camera/lens specs needed to produce an exhibition quality 16x20 print?
I think there's something very important in this question that should be considered.
If this question were to be carefully answered then that data would provide a lot of help in deciding the 'how many pixels' question.
I'd love to see a real piece of carefully done research.
Something along the lines of the same shot/same conditions with various levels of cameras (8 meg fixed-lens, 8/12/16 meg dSLR, 16/22 meg MF). Print the files out at standard sizes from 8x10 to huge.
Then hang the prints in a public place and have people judge them/have advanced photographers judge them.
Heck, throw in 35mm and a few sizes of film and lets get these arguments behind us.
(And, yes, it would take some work to make it a good study. All research is that way.)
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I just had a recollection. About 40 years ago I saw a photo of two men plying golf. I sould easily see the golf ball on the green. It helped to tell it was a golf ball to see the green and two golfers. I could see the dimples or the name on the ball though. The most amazing thing to me was the photo was taken with a MF camera on an airplane 65,000 feet above the golf course and traveling at 1200 mph. That was 40 years ago and film. How good can digital get?
That would be the SR-71 Blackbird with the Boeing Technical Objective Camera. The aircraft could carry two cameras either film or a 25Mpixel digital back (not tried operationally though - NB this is in the 1970s).
I would dispute that the cameras could resolve the dimples on a golf ball (or even the glof ball itself) from 80,000ft at 1,200mph. The cameras in the Blackbird were lateral (in that they took pictures sideways out of the aircraft) so atmospheric affects are going to be increased and motion blur at 1,200mph is going to require an unrealistic shutter speed to prevent motion blur of tiny objects.
From a commercial perspective I have dealt with aerial reconnaisance photography (usually 4-5 years behind in terms of quality compared with military applications, though ultimately the technology trickles down), and the fiction quite often exceeds reality by quite a considerable margin.
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Reminds me a bit of the very first photo I sold about 6 years ago, taken with an old Minolta 35mm camera and cheap Tamron 70-300 zoom. With camera vertical on tripod, I took 13 shots of the city below from a tourist lookout, using Ektachrome 200 and lens at maximum zoom.
I scanned the slides on my Nikon LS-2000 but had to reduce the resolution to around 1500 dpi so Panavue's stitching software could handle the job which resulted in a final image of a mere 250MB.
I printed the image on my new Epson 1200 using roll paper and Corel's PhotoPaint which has a tiling facility. (Photoshop couldn't do the job). The print was 8ft long by 12.5". Sold it to the local council.
What excited me about the photo was the fact it had been taken using cheap consumer equipment yet was higher resolution than any single shot from any expensive professional camera that money could buy.
I intend going back to that spot on the right day, when conditions are perfect, and repeat the exercise using my 20D with 100-400 zoom plus 1.4x extender giving me an effective 35mm focal length close to 900mm. Instead of 13 shots in a row, it'll be something like 120 shots in 3 or 4 rows and I'll be able to read the logos on the aircraft landing in the distance.
Okay! Not as big as the Delft photo, but I think a more interesting scene :D .
I'm waiting for computer technology to develop a bit so this job will be easier. I want stitching software to improve; 1GB sticks (or even 2GB sticks) of RAM to be faster, cheaper and more readily available; 64 bit operating systems to be standard and an upgrade to Photoshop that allows access to at least 8GB of memory.
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Ray and Bob,
I agree that most of the price difference between Leica and more mainsteam but good quality lenses is related to economies of scale, plus perhaps the labor costs of satisfying customers who will only accept a lens that has been hand assembled and inspected in Europe or the USA rather than say Asia (Japan is off-limits for many lens snobs, let alone China.)
Probably the bottom line on possible price/quality is indicated by the lowest price for a decent lens of a certain type when there are competitive third party options. Given that the third party makers generally do not quite meet the quality of the camera maker's lenses (particularly as far build quality) my best guess is that fully matching the overall quality of a good lens from a major camera maker inherently costs a bit more than such third party lenses.
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China has an advantage when the labor content of a product is significant. When the product is manufactured and assembled by machinery they don't compete as well.
I thought just about everything is manufactured and assembled by machinery nowadays, Bob. Multinationals often set up business in China to get the best of both worlds; a new factory with the latest technology plus a low wage, hard working, often highly skilled workforce.
We ship iron ore, wool and energy to China. They ship back low priced manufactured goods. We have a trade imbalance of several A$ billion that's in their favour.
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What if you were to take x number of your satellite's highest-res photos and then applied some kind of sampling software to come up with a most probable licence number? If they managed to distinguish three grapefruits on a contrasting background, then a license plate might not be entirely out of the question. License plate numbers and letters are almost by definition set up to be easily distinguishable, and each letter/number is a significant fraction of the visual size of a grapefruit.
You would also have non-photographic data to add to your observation: the car is in California and the letters and numbers seen to be right for California; so you scan the California license data base on the most probably numbers and find that of your fifty best guesses, only one is on a readily-distinguishable Hummer...
JC
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Most web photo forums have frequent discussions of whether to buy now or wait for better equipment, lower prices, etc. We then get the usual inane "buy now and prepare top spend big bucks to upgrade because that's the way the world is gonna work" or "relax and enjoy what you've got, it's good enough, and besides, a really good photographer can take great photos with 1mp Kodaks and a stick like Ansel Adams did."
But there are reasons (I have a couple, think of your own) for owning really good equipment right now; and also reasons for waiting, if the wait is short (less than a year.) So here's the question: Are the top line affordable cameras -- say the Canon 1DsMII -- good enough in producing 13x19 prints, that it's going to be a long time before newer cameras can produce better 13x19 prints? I don't want a discussion of technique, etc., so let's just say, prints of a photographic target under a variety of lighting conditions. Will there be massive improvements in dynamic range, or color quality, or light sensitivity, or noise control? Or are we now talking about small incremental changes? I read Reichmann's piece comparing the 1DsMII to the P25, and I wonder, if you are working with an Epson 4000, are you going to see a practical difference at 13x19? Will you ever? I understand that if you built a billion megapixal chip you could make a billboard that would be sharp under a loupe, but what will people finally settle upon as a practical optimum, where the critical factors become lens quality and ergonomics rather than bigger chips? Are we there now? Will be there soon?
I want to buy a camera now that I can work with, and settle on, for a long time, without giving up much in the way of print quality. Like everybody else, I think about price, but that's not as critical as the other considerations. I own a ton of Nikon equipment, but I'm getting very tired of waiting for Nikon to produce a camera that will match other camera's finest 13x19s. Right now I'm working with 2 Kodaks, and the good photos are fine, but the cameras have limits, especially in low light, and frankly, the ergonomics drive me crazy. I'm willing to make the switch to Canon, but I'd be less willing if I were convinced that the 1DsMII is just another one-year temporary waypost on the way to a real camera.
JC
A Mark I 1Ds can make very nice prints up to 24x36, something that no one is going to look at and be unfavorably impressed. 13x19 is no problem; the 1Ds can deliver most of what most printers are capable of putting on paper. There's still some room for improvement in prints that size, but not major, earth-shattering ones. Handling and high ISO performance of the 1Ds are not as good as the 1Ds-MkII, but still significantly better than anything on the Nikon side of the fence. Resolution is good enough to challenge many of the finest lenses available for the format. And they're going for less than $4000 used on EBay.
I currently own the 1Ds and 1D-MkII. I wouldn't mind having a 1Ds-MkII, but the reality is that the classic 1Ds/1D-MkII combo is more than capable of meeting my clients' needs, and until I start having clients complain about what I deliver, keeping up with the Joneses is not sensible financially. So I'm going to keep what I've got unless I fall into a bunch of extra cash.
If you didn't have a bunch of Nikon glass, the 1Ds-MkII would be a solid long-term choice; a 1Ds or 1D-MkII would be solid alternatives if you're on a budget, depending on what you shoot. Since you've got a bunch of Nikon gear, it may be worthwhile to wait for the D2X ship before deciding whether to switch systems or not. But I'm not convinced it's going to be a Canon-killer.
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If Mamiya hits a home run with their ZD it will be a milestone ... a pivotal event ... because perhaps it will make someone else believe that Canon can indeed be challenged. But think of all the things that MUST come together. They have to match or exceed Canon on all the points. From resolution to iso to build quality. A bigger chip alone will not do it.
I have to agree with you on this one.
For some reason, I could care less about the Mamiya ZD now. It'll be like buying a slow version of Canon's future 1Ds2 replacement, (since the ZD is 1.5fps, with a 50-400 ISO range only). But then again, these are tools. The ZD would be a great landscape tool. The Canon would be a do-it-all kind of tool, with equal, or better resolution, faster frame rates, and a full range of ISO capabilities.
My main point: We've already seen the 1Ds2 beat the 16mp Kodak Pro back, so why won't the next Canon beat the Mamiya ZD, or even the P25? Who knows? Maybe it will. I realize the 24x36 sensor has it's limits in megapixels. Maybe once 35mm reaches 22mp, things will slow down a bit, and Medium Format will begin to develop more rapidly.
T-1000
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Digital sensors in conjunction with in-camera noise reduction systems are gradually getting better. But there's no substitute for a good lens. The apparent quality variability between lenses of the same model and price, as reported on this site and others, is a disgrace. The precision of computer assisted manufacturing processes should be able to address this issue. I don't know why this is not happening. There's very little literature on the subject that's readily available and I confess I don't understand the problems.
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The 'sites per area' issue is most likely going to be limited by noise and ISO issues. And if those limits can be significantly pushed then half-frame cameras will start to replace full-frames and the MF digital back market really will be eaten up by full-frames.
Sorry, but this is absolutely false unless vastly better lenses can be made than what seems to be possible today. The 1dsMKII already has far more resolution than most lenses (esp. wide) can match. The fact is that today's best ultrawide lenses are not as good as those old Zeiss and Leica designs and there is no particular reason (except blind optimism) to think that there's any lens miracles in store any time soon.
Even in the very unlikely event that miracle lens technologies are around the corner, there's still the problem that extremely high density sensors will result in extremely limited DOF if you want to see that extreme resolution at any but exactly in the middle focus. You don't have the option of increasing DOF with smaller apertures either because then you lose that extreme resolution due to diffraction. There's only one way that effective real life meaningful resolution can go beyond 1dsMKII level and that's with bigger sensors. In fact, 1dsMKII is already beyond optimal efficiency. You only get anything close to maximum benefit from all those pixels if you're using a world class lens (only available at all from 35mm on up) at optimal aperture (about f8) and without much DOF required.
If you want substantially higher than 1ds resolution without a lot of lens quality limitations, severe DOF constraints, and severe aperture constraints there's no alternatives except larger sensors. The laws of physics related to optical issues and the realities of lens design and manufacturing are not as easy to deal with as just creating a lot of hype and marketing razzle-dazzle to convince us that more and more sensor site density is worth spending a bunch more money every year or two. If only physics and engineering limitations were as easy to control as consumer opinions and unreasoned ignorant faith. More is not always better, except, of course for the shareholders.
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A few comments
a) From the low end of compact digicams, I read an interestng interview with someone from Sony on trends in that market; one observation was that lots of customers are realizing that "they do not need 5MP", so probably a lot of digicam emphasis wil go in other directions: even smaller, HDTV quality video, whatever. Of course, the pixel race continues for other digicam customers; the ones who also crave amplifiers with 0.0001% THD.
I expect that at various higher market levels, the same will happen; seking other ways to differentiate DSLRs beyond mere pixel count upsizing; I hope that dynamic range becomes a bigger DSLR marketing point.
didger, you say again that the only way out of the jaws of too little DOF or too much diffraction is larger formats, even after I refuted it and pointed out that there is NO WAY out of that dilemma once pixel counts get too high. If you wish to continue making this claim in favor of larger formats, please offer some arguments or evidence for it.
(To repeat, using any given effective aperture diameter and focus distance gives fixed proportions between image size, circle of confusion sizes and diffraction spot size, regardless of focal length. So on prints with the subject appearing at a given size, you get the same degree of blurring from both diffraction and OOF effects.)
c) I expect that electronic sensors can improve to the point that lenses are the dominant determinant of image sharpness, contrast and such; in analogy to digital audio, high end digital imaging will probably use "oversampling" to avoid moire and such. Then, the best MF lenses will likely have the ultimate advantage over smaller formats in terms of image sharpness (roughly measured by MTF at a given "lines per picture height" or by angular resolution, to allow for the smaller enlargement needed from a larger format).
d) It was interesting to read Kev Raber of Phase 1 say that "Medium format systems and even present DSLR system will keep their price points."
That is a trend I have seen with higher end products; certain markets (e.g. MF studio photographers) seem to have acceptable price points, and one strategy is to keep product lines at various such price points while improving quality.
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Seems to me there's some powerful resolving going on in the Pro I's glass. Is there something about smaller lenses that makes them better? (Or am I lost in space?)
Lenses that cover a small image circle are much more easily made to resolve more lp/mm. The bigger the image circle, the harder it is to maintain a decent MTF at higher lp/mm. The Pro/1's lens resolves more lp/mm at 50% MTF than the EF 135/2L, but it would vignette like crap in front of a 1Ds sensor.
Well, duh. :D
Thanks for the conformation that smaller is easier. But did you read the rest of the post?
Give a bit of thought to a 16 meg/120 mm sq sensor or a 32 meg/240 mm sq sensor and the smaller lenses that it would take to service them.
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Howard,
I think Fatali got a bad rap. It was a great idea really. He just didn't think it through. Actually I would like to do it myself. Perhaps not on and in a National monument however.
When I try it I will use large cast iron pots as the fire pits instead of disposable aluminum turkey roasting pans.
Anyway, foolish ventures aside, the guy does make some great prints even IF he's always 'waiting for the light'.
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Consider a really small pixel that can absorb only 1000 photons to maximum well capacity. Square root of a thousand is 32. Photonic noise is 3.2% of the signal. A big difference.
I'm a little confused. Is 3% relevant? With one single f-stop being 100% more light (photons) or 50% less light (photons) is 3% meaningful?
I'm of the sense, that the future is at the pixel level. From photographs put out by the companies, the light collecting area is a small percentage of the pixel area. Is there a future technology that can improve this? I'll bet there is.
Also, can less noisy amplication allow the pixel to perform well at lower light levels. This permits the opportunity of reducing pixel size with the same performance. Did Sony come up with a breakthrough and share it with Nikon. Are Fuji's R pixels (it may be the other one- well anyway the small one) clean enough to be used as the principle light collecting device. maybe not now but coming soon.
The hard to grasp concept is the pixel is only a data sample, vs. film which is analog and continuous capture. Lots of dead space between pixel capture area (silicon).
So if we're reassempling and interprelating data points how does chip (vs. film) size matter anymore. I don't see the relationship between size and output as we had with film where the enlargement reduction of the larger negative was the principle advantage of going large. Tri-X was Tri-X whether 35MM or MF or 4x5. But the final print looked distinctly different when printed at the same size.
Software improvements can work with the data to improve color and resolution. Oversampling worked with digital music, is there an equivalent for the visual arts. Probably.
So, to me, it means, I must think in terms of good data. This leads me to the conclusion that pixel quality supported by lens quality are the two principle factors determining our future.
I bought a Nikon Coolpix 880 (7 megapixel I think) for a walking about camera. I have a shot from northern NM that looks the full equal of my 20D and D70. I did put it on a tripod, used the lens better aperature, had pretty light, and the subject was pleasing. Little tiny pixels, noisy for sure as higher ISO, crappy electronic viewfinder, but in a narrow element it worked as well as anything at that pixel quantity. Now no one uses it that way, the vast majority of shooters (including the spouse unit) use this camera P&S (why I like the new anti-shake) as do my digital artists in reference gathering.
Back to the point, Its now all about collecting data and chip area is no longer the critical determinant as it was in film. I think long term LF is dead, and that MF will become view cameras (aka sinar F3) for the movements that the view camera allows. hand held cameras over 10 mpxl's are capable of doing most everything other than giant prints and even then for some subjects do fine.
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smaller sensors; smaller, lighter, cheaper, and easier to build lenses.
'Fraid not. That would only be true if the resolution didn't need to be increased to match the smaller sensor sites. Increasing the resolution of the sensor means to take decent advantage of that the lenses need to be correspondingly improved in resolution. That means tighter design specifications, tighter manufacturing procedures, much less tolerance for error anywhere in the process and finally much tighter quality control and also much better build so things don't start to shift after the lens leaves the factory. Since build and sample variation problems are already huge with present day lenses and most of them are inadequate to take anywhere near full advantage of a 1dsMKII, there's little hope for much better lenses than that right around the corner.
This thread has indicated some remarkable possibilities for radical sensor quality improvements and increased sensor site densities, but without improvements in lens technology, this is a bit pointless beyond a certain point; a point that has already been exceeded with 1dsMKII.
Anyone one know of any really cool ways that lenses can be improved enough and be realistically manufactured? Please keep in mind that no present day ultrawides (expept maybe Leica) are nearly as good as old Zeiss lenses. We need lenses very much better than that. Who's going to make them, and how, and is there anything under way? Canon released 1dsMKII with nothing whatsoever in the way of improved lenses, especially the sorely deficient ultrawides.
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This thread is BOOMING with info. It'll be funny to look at this thread in about 3-5 years, and see how accurate our predictions for the future were.
T-1000
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I confess I don't understand most of the more technical talk here, but answer a couple of questions for me.
1. Some depth-of-field problems are solved by shift lenses. There are also back shifts on most LF cameras. One of the problems with back shifts in 35mm cameras, as I understand it, is that in using roll film, there were inherent engineering problems regarding film (differing amounts of tightness of the film, different sprocket efficiencies, reflectivity, etc.) Now we have a flat solid "film" base in the sensor; we also have electronic view finders. Wouldn't it be fairly simple (conceptually, at least) to create a moveable back for 35mm that would resolve a lot of DOF problems?
2. I love the sampling idea (sampling the photosites and then sorting noise from actual photon responses by comparing two or more frames.) We already have high-speed cameras and lenses, called movie cameras. We also have multiple shot MF cameras. So there's no problem with the concept. Electronic exposures could be much faster than mechanical ones, so why couldn't we have, say, a 3-shot 1DsMIII that shoots 3 1/500 of a second shots quickly enough that you wouldn't get blur, and then create the photo with statistical analysis of photo-site returns? You might have to set up some rules for the three-shot mode -- camera mounted on a tripod, say -- but it could be an extremely useful mode for certain kinds of photography.
JC
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Someone mentioned image stabilization; my hope is doing it in a teleconverter; one IS TC for use with all lenses. I think that it could be a "1x" TC if you just want the stabilization.
Olympus has some stabilization patents that involve moving a thin, isolated lens element at the back of the lens assembly, so it seems possible to put this thin moving lens instead at the front of a TC.
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I just reread the entire thread. Whew, lots of interesting dialog here. This community is so much different than the one on DPreview. A real breath of fresh air..and very informative.
I'm trying to envision the next generation of camera as per the original thread header. I'm going to play Nostradomas, feel free to disagree or ignore.
1) Much technology from the past will be carried forward.
-35mm form factor -
-optical viewfinder
-35mm lens technology
-metering technology
-autofocus
-antishake/stabilization
all the above incrementally improved
2) new technology from the coming era
-sensor technology - pixel tech will continue to evolve. Since the strength of the semiconductor industry is getting more with less, denser pixel technology will be the emphasis. Bigger sensors will just be flat out expensive - maybe forever. Can they survive the cost curve when smaller sensors will improve in output quality and be far cheaper, somewhat do the the massive run rates and corresponding cost reduction that infers. The sensor will stabilize at the size that provides the most economic return for the companys.
-sensor data - built into the camera will be a vastly more powerful processor that will adjust (warn) the photographer that the exposure is out of range of the sensor and possibly correct or prevent incorrect exposure unless over-ridden. Possible automatic multiple images to overcome dynamic range exceeding sensor capture range. Fractel processing within the capture to increase apparent resolution of the raw image. Faster(better) processing of exposure i.e. I can see a version of Photoshop allowing curves/level adjustment within the camera and available immediately post exposure.
I can see the output size (print size) being camera selected and the file size being adjusted by internal uprezzing with the available data.
Lens optimization - A version of DXO build into the camera that knows the strengths and weaknesses of each lens and adjusts accordingly.
I predict that cameras will stabilize in the 12-17 mpxl range, which is the outer limits of current lens (and probably future) technology and is more than enough for 95+% of all needs. Future changes will be focused on cost (price) reduction and will fracture camera offerings into smaller micromarket units. i.e. still life, action, landscape, fashion, etc.
Canon and Nikon will lead the way. Canon's breakthrough was CMOS with very low noise. Nikon will show us next month (maybe) if smaller and lower cost pixels can replace or at least equal larger pixels. It should be interesting.
Me, I'm going to buy the ubercamera I just described in this post as well as a mini view camera (6x7), with a fast and capable scanning back when Betterlight decides to make it available.
Bob
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Realistically there can't be $10 worth of material in a lens. Some glass, some metal. A bit of paint. (OK, I don't really don't know about the $10 figure, but it can't be much.)
Yeah, right. And a Pentium CPU has 5 cents worth of silicon (melted sand) in it. What a rip-off...
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Do you ever remember anyone complaining about some Canon Ls weren't that good back in the days of film?
Yeh, but in those days people were not making their comparisons at billboard size magnification, neither were they expecting a 35mm camera to act as a 6X9 or even 4X5.
If people would only let 35mm lenses be 35mm lenses....
When I started shooting weddings with a 10D, I noticed that my sigma 28-70 EX f2.8 was noticeably softer than my 17-40L. It bothered me for a few minutes until I stopped and thought.
In the past when I was shooting on film, I was very happy with the prints made with this lens, they were definitely good enough or better. Infact I have a 18X12" print on my wall taken with the lens and I had never complained about a lack of sharpness. So why was it bothering me now?
Needless to say, I'm still happy with the prints made with this lens. It's good enough!
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In my opinion, Canon may be at a disavantage in the bigger than 35mm camera market.
In a strange sense Canon is at an obvious disadvantage in the bigger than 24x36mm market, but it hardly matters since they are not in that market all and I see not the slightest reason to think that they are interested in it either, or need to be.
Canon and Nikon have been immensely successful for decades while ignoring larger formats, and digital is moving the distribution of format sizes down, or at least not up, so why on earth would such companies start to care about upsizing now?
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Deleted by poster.
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I wonder how much NASA paid for their 8mp sensors 10 years ago.... half a million each?
I am not sure that NASA even had them. The sensors in the current explorations of Saturn and Titan, and recent explorations of Mars, are 1MP or less. That is due to a mixture of reasons
- the roughly decade lead time from design to mission completion,
- the requirements of the sensor being proven to be very rugged for its long, sometimes very cold, sometimes very hot, sometimes violent trip,
- the limited transmission bandwidth, and
- for most of their purposes, mosaicing a number of moderate resolution, narrow field of view images is more flexible and cost effective than taking higher resolution wider angle images, or packing a zoom lens.
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Geez! Isn't this a long thread! Okay! The problem: Can modern lenses pick up number plate details from outer space? John has suggested intelligent interpolation of detail from other sources. Who can argue with that. I'm sure it happens. But I'm also sure it doesn't happen when it should.
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If you didn't have a bunch of Nikon glass, the 1Ds-MkII would be a solid long-term choice; a 1Ds or 1D-MkII would be solid alternatives if you're on a budget, depending on what you shoot.
Geez, Jonathan, it sounds like you're the guy in the Ferrari in Stef's story, advising us to buy a Corvette if we're on a budget. :laugh:
Lisa (whose most expensive camera is a D70; Honda Civic equivalent???)
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For the people who say, "Wait for the D2x" or maybe a FF Nikon, I would agree that if you've got a lot of Nikon equipment, like I do, that wouldn't be a bad idea. The problem is that some of us (like me) are getting a little old. I figure that if I perform according to the actuarial tables for a guy of my age and health, I've got maybe -- maybe, optimistically -- fifteen years of shooting left. If I wait three years for a Nikon that will make a Epson 4000 print as good as a 1DsMII, that's 20 percent of my remaining time. As I said, some of us have reason for wanting the really good stuff now.
I'm very aware of the ZD because I own a Mamiya RZ system; but if you drive long distances to shoot, you sort of want a backup. Two ZDs will probably run $26,000 to $30,000; two 1DsMIIs will run $16,000, and the lens selection and autofocus (important when your eyes get older) is better with Canon. And nobody has ever shot a ZD. As far as I know, they might be building them the same place they're building the full-frame Nikon.
I shot an F5 from the day they came out, and really think no better camera was ever made. The ergonomics were wonderful, the camera was as durable as a hammer. But I hate wet darkrooms. If only Nikon could make a 1DsMII digital equivalent based on an F5; I'd buy two in an instant. Nikon had the pro market to itself for so long that they not only got arrogant, they got stupid. If somebody from Nikon would call me up and say, 'We believe that we will match the 1DsMII next September,' I'd wait. But even with the rampant disputes on the net about when the D2X is coming out (and the D2X won't match the Canon), Nikon hasn't said a word after the original announcement, even when great doubt is being case on its veracity. No reassuring comments, nothing. That's just plain dumb.
As for Kodak, I like some (most?) prints I get from my SLR/n, but the range of acceptable conditions is too narrow (can't really shoot after about three o'clock in the afternoon), and the camera itself is a kludge. Doesn't anybody from Kodak actually take pictures? You can work around the problems (like taking a Dremel tool to the knobs on your shift lens to make it fit the body) but I don't want to. I want the camera to be right. I actually think the suggestion that Kodak might get out of making DSLRs is a good one, because they're not good at making them.
So. I'm keeping an eye on Nikon and Mamiya through the PMA, which I think is in February. If nothing happens then, some of you may have the opportunity to buy some really good Nikon-based equipment really cheap.
JC
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Why the lens situation? Because they don't care. They don't listen to us and they don't have to. The situation can only get worse. We sold our souls when we went whole hog after digital.
I wish I could find a good Plaubel Veriwide 100.
http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/veriwide.html (http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/veriwide.html)
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Another little discussed reason why more MP will stop to make sense very soon is hand shake...
I have never seen a serious 1Ds vs 1DsMKII for hand held shooting, but I am 90% sure that there is virtually no resolution advantage for the 1DSMKII when shooting hand held in most situations.
For all the people shooting handheld, the only solution will be to go for larger sensors and MF is then the only option. Here also, we are probably close to the limit though.
The reasoning here, I believe, involves the size of the individual photosites.
Based on the size of the photosites used in consumer, fixed-lens cameras you could cram zillions of sites on a full-frame sensor and still hand hold the camera.
(Or am I missing something?)
The 'sites per area' issue is most likely going to be limited by noise and ISO issues. And if those limits can be significantly pushed then half-frame cameras will start to replace full-frames and the MF digital back market really will be eaten up by full-frames.
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didger, you say again that the only way out of the jaws of too little DOF or too much diffraction is larger formats, even after I refuted it and pointed out that there is NO WAY out of that dilemma once pixel counts get too high.
It's a question of pixel count relative to sensor "real estate", not a matter of absolute pixel count. Do you think that a 16.7 Mpixel 8x10 back would give you the same diffraction and DOF constraints as a 16.7 Mpixel 35mm sensor? If that were true, then 8x10 film would be similarly constrained and useless. There's reasons why people go for the hassle and expense and cumbersome shooting of large format. The same reasons (higher resolution) apply to digital sensors in just the same way as film.
Refuting is not the same as proving. I can refute the theory that the earth is round. MF sensors will never rival 8x10 either, even if they could ever pack that many pixels into the relatively small size of a medium format sensor. At this point it's still highly speculative just how high sensor density can get without noise problems and how good lenses can be made. The lens problem seems to be the biggest bottle neck and I've seen nothing whatsoever to indicate that 35mm lenses (esp. wide) will ever properly support even 16 Mpixel sensors and I similarly see no hope of MF lenses ever being able to support much more than about 25 Mpixel backs adequately. Forget rivaling 8x10, or even 4x5 at largest print sizes.
Using any given effective aperture diameter and focus distance gives fixed proportions between image size, circle of confusion sizes and diffraction spot size, regardless of focal length. So on prints with the subject appearing at a given size, you get the same degree of blurring from both diffraction and OOF effects.)
Yeah, but if you have low to moderate sensor element density, then number of sensor sites is the resolution limiting factor more often and you have relatively more perceived DOF. If you have a huge sensor site density then the optics are the resolution limiting factor, whether it's basic lens resolving power or DOF constraints (leaving you a much smaller area in your print that's up to the resolution level that this ultra dense sensor is capable of). Same thing for diffraction. The lenses diffract the same at a given aperture regardless, but a denser sensor reveals a smaller amount of diffraction blurring than a less packed sensor.
I expect that electronic sensors can improve to the point that lenses are the dominant determinant of image sharpness, contrast and such
No need to wait. The 1ds sensor already outperforms a lot of lenses (even very expensive ultrawide zooms) and 1dsMKII outperforms almost all lenses available for the camera.
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Seems to me there's some powerful resolving going on in the Pro I's glass. Is there something about smaller lenses that makes them better? (Or am I lost in space?)
Lenses that cover a small image circle are much more easily made to resolve more lp/mm. The bigger the image circle, the harder it is to maintain a decent MTF at higher lp/mm. The Pro/1's lens resolves more lp/mm at 50% MTF than the EF 135/2L, but it would vignette like crap in front of a 1Ds sensor.
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Well, just a few minutes ago Jonathan's 24x36 print that he made for me arrived and it's incredibly close to what the monitor shows and also incredibly sharp. The sharpness and absolute absence of any artifacts from pretty massive processing really amazed me. Of course, I had to do a lot of cleanup before I sent the file to Jonathan, but the whole procedure from shooting through printing really worked.
I assume from this that you found the print satisfactory?
Did you take a look at the CD included with the print?
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About well capacity and signal to noise ratios. The short answer is that with current sensor technologies, larger photosite areas give greater dynamic range: a greater range from the high luminosity level beyond which highlights are blown out because the electron well is full, to the lowest level where signal to noise ratio is tolerable in the shadows.
For barely acceptable appearance in shadows a local S/N ratio at individual shadow pixels of about ten is needed according to Kodak, and as Ray indicates, this needs at least 100 electrons counted just to overcome photon shot noise. (Other noise sources push the practical lower limit up). If your well capacity is about 100,000 (as for current medium format back sensors), that optimistically gives a range of about 100 to 100,000, or 1,000:1, or about ten stops from highlights to darkest decently reproduced shadow areas.
Bigger photosites gather more light at the same ISO, and hence have better S/N. But to get the same shutter speed, same DOF, same resolution needs focal length increased in proportion to pixel size and aperture ratio in increased in proportion to focal length, and so a higher ISO. The total rate of illumination per pxel is then the same (larger pixel, but lower intensity due to higher f-stop). So, same FOV, DOF and shutter speed give the same photon count and same S/N ratio at each pixel in the image, but the bigger sensor has more highlight headroom.
So, increasng pixel and sensor size gives you choices like
(a) less visible noise, but less DOF and/or longer exposure time ("same highlight range, better shadows, more OOF or motion blur"), and
( same DOF and shutter speed, same visible noise levels, more highlight headroom ("same shadows, more highlight range").
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smaller sensors; smaller, lighter, cheaper, and easier to build lenses.
'Fraid not. That would only be true if the resolution didn't need to be increased to match the smaller sensor sites.
I don't think its quite that simple. Lots of lens defect are less applicable with smaller field to cover. I know a large format lens fight the old curvature of the focus plane. Stopping down for more depth of field is almost a must. Fast LF lenses are for achieving a bright image to compose and do preliminary focus with a touchup upon stopping down.
Another practical issue is how to best use the massive installed base of lens' in the market, and the current higher end manufacturing capacity largely devoted to 35mm. because the typical lens is sharpest in the middle, what format best uses the quality of the installed base. I always thought changing the 35mm digital from 1x1.5 to 1x1.25 would be very useful. It fits the old 8x10 or 16x20 paper standard. Even a small reduction in size should help.
What I do know is there are a number of very bright people working on this as we speak. Change happens fast now days.
Nice thread. BJL, I appreciate your posting. I find this a very interesting topic.
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And those 8 megs of Pro 1 photo sites sure are tighter packed....
(Now Digger, you ought to be clamoring for things to move in the direction of smaller sensors/smaller lenses. Imagine sticking a 22 meg camera in your shirt pocket on a future trip high into the mountains.)
Well, we're not talking about 8 megs here, we're talking about going beyond 11, going beyond 16. I see nothing on the horizon in terms of sensor technology or lens technology, especially not lens technology, that promises much in the way of going beyond 11 megs for 1.6x sensors or 16 megs for full size 35mm sensors. I AM an SF fan, but I know the difference between science and science fiction. Nanotechnology is a nice buzz word and means so many different things in different contexts, but I have not been informed of anything on the way for lenses that has anything to do with any definition of nanotechnology. Sure, I'd like a 50 Mpixel shirt pocket camera with a 12 to 500 zoom lens and perfect image stabilization and 15 stop dynamic range, but clamoring for that? That's wasted clamor. I do expect to own a 22 Mpixel MF outfit within a year or so, however, and that will be as backpackable as my present 1ds kit. It relies on no clamoring for SF to become reality. The technology is here already and it only needs to be packaged more conveniently and get a little cheaper. ZD may be that thing, but if not, something else will be here soon. Didger says so.
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Judging by the number and length of posts on this topic, I'd guess the shooting condistions are poor out there.
Here's what I want the boys in the lab to work on.
1) 25 MP imaging, 35mm form-factor sensor. I can use legacy lenses and that's enough data for a 24X36 inch print at resolution better than my eyes can see.
2) Lots more exposure latitude. Three more stops should do it. I want to put all my grads on eBay.
3) Get rid of that stupid mirror and curtain shutter stuff. It's complex, noisy, uses power, wears out and makes my pictures bad at long exposures. Use electronics to make the whole thing solid state, silent, programmable.
4) While you're getting rid of that stupid mirror stuff, make the viewfinder MUCH image bigger and brighter. If you ever have the chance, peer through an Arriflex or Panavision movie camera. Now THAT'S a viewfinder.
6) Perfect the IS process. Put it in the body. When it works, it's a huge benefit. Unfortunately, currently, it's not constistent. My 200mm Nikkor VR has made motion-blurred images at 1/250th.
7) Why not three chips, one each for RGB? No self-respecting cameraman uses a single-chip camcorder, why not us stills users? Bye-bye Bayer. BJL: what resolution gains could we expect if we ditched the Bayer algorithms?
8) Ruggedizing/weatherproofing My D70 won't tolerate much abuse. I crave abuse.
9) In-camera noise reduction improvements. Noise is always with us. The earlier in the process we eliminate it, the better.
10) Foolproof sensor dust elimination. Whatever it takes, boys.
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"Instead of an RRP of $1000 for each and every lens, a lens could come in 3 flavours; $2000 for the few that are spot on; $1000 for the bulk of them that are average, and $500 for those near the lower end of the QC range. Total revenue the same."
No so fast my friend. This assuems perhaps that the number of $500 lenses and the number of $2000 lenses balance to $1000. It also assumes that the market for these lenses would not change. If fact, no one or a fewer number of people would want the $500 lens, and maybe a lot, or no one would want to pay twice as much for the lens they may have gotten for $1000, especially if they cherry picked. Then there would be $2000 lenses that were only a tad better than the best $1000 lens. "I payed twice as much as you did, and I can't see any difference. What a rip off."
MAybe everyone woulf be happier if they just assumed they would get the worst example, and anything better is a steal.
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"Expose to the right" is histogram-speak for "expose for the highlights", classical advice for users of sensors such as reversal film that have distinctly limited latitude for overexposure.
"Expose to the left" is overdoing it if taken literally, but it sounds something like "expose for the shadows", equally classical advice for negative film usage, where overexposed highlights are less of a worry becasue there is more latitude for burning them in. That is, choose exposure level to ensure sufficient exposure of all relevant shadow regions, but not very much more, because the cost of further increased exposure is longer exposure times. If future sensor technology gives us a nice long, gentle "shoulder" on the response curve, this could make sense.
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If people would only let 35mm lenses be 35mm lenses....
Hey, hey, I'm definitely among the people that are open to that, as long as camera manufacturers don't insist on trying to squeeze MF or LF performance into a 35mm sensor. I find that even though a 1ds is double the resolution of typical 35mm film, my assortment of lenses is equal to the tasks demanded by that sensor resolution. However, even those Zeiss distagon 18 and 28 lenses are only just good enough and the best Canon wider than 35mm are also only just good enough at best. The way to go beyond 16 MPixels is with larger sensors so that we can let 35mm lenses be 35mm lenses and not MF and LF lenses.
As for 18x12 prints being just fine with whatever kind of lens, sure, but what if I want to print really sharp looking 30x40 even for a reasonable viewing distance? I'll need to go beyond anything like present day 35mm lenses (especially ultrawide).
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"I agree that most of the price difference between Leica and more mainsteam but good quality lenses is related to economies of scale, plus perhaps the labor costs of satisfying customers who will only accept a lens that has been hand assembled and inspected in Europe or the USA rather than say Asia (Japan is off-limits for many lens snobs, let alone China.)"
This is driving Leica toward a niche market. The price of a niche product is driven by different factors than the mainstream. Some people will buy a Leica (as an example only) simply because it is a Leica, not whether it is a good value. The niche market is far from a perfect economy. "You get what yo pay for" doesn't work, unless part of what you want is the name on the box.
Total profit, as opposed to profit per unit, can be increased by increasing cost, if that additional cost allows for more units to be sold. If I buy some glass for a higher price, the cost per unit goes up. But if the extra glass will allow more units to be made and sold, profit can rise.
Total profit can be increased by increasing price, even if fewer units are sold.
Reducing cost will increase per unit profit at the same price. What that really gives a company is operating margin. They can make more profit or still compete by reducing price to amintain or increase market share.
In my opinion, Canon may be at a disavantage in the bigger than 35mm camera market. They don't make (that I know of) lenses for bigger cameras and getting into that market could be costly. Maybe someone like Kodak will make a larger format digital that uses whatever available lenses, like their current DSLRs. The merger of Imacon and Hasselblad suggests a digital back for Hasselblad (?). Mamiya is going to larger format digital, but they have the MF platform to start from.
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The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn was launched from Cape Canaveral on 15 October 1997. It took 6.7 years to just get there. So the camera could be no better than what was available 7 years or more ago, plus all the additional time suggested by JBL to design and build the craft.
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What if you were to take x number of your satellite's highest-res photos and then applied some kind of sampling software to come up with a most probable licence number? If they managed to distinguish three grapefruits on a contrasting background, then a license plate might not be entirely out of the question. License plate numbers and letters are almost by definition set up to be easily distinguishable, and each letter/number is a significant fraction of the visual size of a grapefruit.
You would also have non-photographic data to add to your observation: the car is in California and the letters and numbers seen to be right for California; so you scan the California license data base on the most probably numbers and find that of your fifty best guesses, only one is on a readily-distinguishable Hummer...
JC
Wouldn't it just be easier to paint their car's license number in big letters on the roof of the vehicle? If the authorities really wanted to track people from space there are far easier methods than high resolution optics and expensive satellites.
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If someone 5 years ago had told me that there would be any sort of market at all for an $8000 35mm camera I'd have figured they were crazy. If they had told me that I'd be spending way over $10,000 for a complete outfit I'd have known they were totally around the bend. I reckon I'm not going to try to predict limits for what people will spend money for and how much. I do feel confident that small formats will improve and get cheaper and that larger formats will also happen in a serious way and the technology and prices will get better partly from larger format development in itself and partly by incorporating new technologies and improvements made in the much busier small format sector. If a relatively poor semi-pro like me can buy such expensive stuff (it's all a matter of priorities), how small can the potential high end larger format market be?
it occurred to me to wonder exactly what I'm hoping/expecting/demanding to get from better lenses and sensors...Maybe the ability to make loupe-quality 3-foot-by-five-foot shots?
I can't comment on your hopes and expectations; you know best. However, my reasons for going for more and more resolution have nothing to do with "loupe-quality 3-foot-by-five-foot shots". A 24x36 print viewed from several feet away will look better with 1ds than 35mm film or small sensor cameras and look much better with 4x5 than 1ds. Just check out a Michael Fatali or David Muench exhibition some time and compare the quality with Galen Rowell large prints. These are all highly competent and inspired photographs, but resolution DOES matter if you want the best looking large prints. You DON'T need a loupe to see the difference, even if you are happy with the stitches in that quilt. Just look at some large prints from large format media. All will be clear.
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I'm sure there are some people in NASA who are still rolling in laughter as people get excited about the new advances in 8mp 1.6x DSLR sensors, circa 2005...
Those of us who are exited about the new 8mp 1.6x DSLR sensors also have something to laugh about ....... the very low price :D . I wonder how much NASA paid for their 8mp sensors 10 years ago.... half a million each?
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John, I think the ONLY digital cameras that will produce finer prints than the 1Ds2 will be the upcoming Medium Format digital backs/DSLRs, and whatever Canon replaces the 1Ds2 with in the future. I just don't see anyone catching up to the 1Ds2 in the 35mm world, but when/if they do, (Nikon, or someone else), at the same time, Canon will be releasing their 1Ds2 successor, (1Ds3/1D3 with 12mp+ and 8fps?).
Think more about which "System" you want to own, not which camera. The D2x could be great, but if you like the Canon system, lenses, and technology better, then maybe you should forget about the D2x. Canon owners have been shooting with their own "D2x" for more than 2 years now. It's called the 1Ds. Just something to think about.
T-1000
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IMHO and experience, clients don't usually care what gear you use, just as long as your results satisfy their needs. (ad agency suits/wannabees notwithstanding)
Exactly, my wedding clients just about understand the difference between film and digital (so we get Cd's instead of negs, great!). That argument is totally false, plenty photographers shooting weddings with old Leica's, Hassie's and F3's, no one asks them why they arn't shooting with the 1Ds mark II, for your client it's the pictures that speak, they won't peer at your camera to find out the model number, even if they were to know the difference.
This is even more the case for landscape photography were the only, ONLY thing that sells is your pictures, nothing else.
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Somebody has built a camera that is far better than anything else in its class. It has no real competition. But it's expensive. This is the death knell of photography.
Sorry Scott, that makes absolutely no sense. The reason Canon has no real competition in the 35mm and under DSLR format idecause their stuff is so good, not because it sucks. Spending "up to $5000" for a fixed-lens film camera with far less capability is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. You certainly aren't saving any money in the long run if you actually use the camera (you'll have to buy a scanner to go with it, and film), and you aren't going to gain much in image quality.
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The number of megs will most likely continue to increase and prices will likely continue to fall. But the number of megs, just like the clock speed of computers may well become less of an issue within the near future.
Possibly. But I still remember the days I first got interested in HiFi. I got a book on the basics from Radio Shack which explained that the ear had a range from 20Hz to 20kHz and could detect harmonic distortions as low as 1%. (In fact, I later discovered this varies between about 0.35% and 5% depending on musical content.)
Yet all the advertisements for amplifiers in those days boasted THD of much less than 1%, like... err... 0.0001%. What's going on here? I guess the pressure is on for salesman to sell amplifiers. Companies who produce amplifiers want to continue doing so. The fact that their amplifiers don't sound any better than (and in the view of some, not as good as) pre World War ll valve amplifiers, will not deter them.
The 20D is more useable than the D60 at high ISO's thanks to computer chip and programming developments, but at ISO 100 it's no better. Why is this? Could Canon have produced a 20D with 6 megapixels which had lower noise than the D60 and 10D at ISO 100 as well as at higher ISO's? Did the marketing guys at Canon agree that an 8mp camera was going to sell better? Or is there some real obstacle as a result of the laws of Physics which just can't be surmounted?
If the last point is true, then pixel count will continue to increase because there's no where else to go ??? .
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Well, if I can weigh in here (I'm a professor of clear thinking... only kidding :D ).
I've noticed Didger's made a number of comments expressing an opinion that the 1Ds and 1Ds ll sensor is already as good as most of Canon's lenses and therefore there's no point in upgrading to the Mkll expecting better resolution if current lenses are not up to the job.
There's a misleading implication in such comments that current sensors are actually outresolving the lens. The same mistake was made with regard to film as film emulsions became finer grained with greater resolving power. You'd hear comments that film was becoming so good it could outresolve most lenses. In a sense this could be considered true in terms of MTF response at a specific resolution. At 20 lp/mm, for example, many films can record detail with no loss of contrast, ie the film has an MTF response of 100% at 20 lp/mm. No lens is this good. However, the same film at 30 lp/mm might be down to 50% MTF and many good lenses can do better than this.
T-Max 100 B&W film can apparently record up to 50 lp/mm with no loss of contrast and at 100 lp/mm MTF is around 60%. Clearly no lens is this good so I suppose it's a fair statement that T-Max 100 can outresolve all lenses.
I don't know what it would take to design a 16mp full frame sensor capable of recording 50 lp/mm with no loss of contrast, but if it is ever possible, I think you'd find that many current Canon lenses would show a marked improvement with such a camera.
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In my opinion, yes indeed. Sometimes when reading this forum, I get the idea that even attempting to take a decent photograph without a Canon 1ds, a Zeiss prime lens at f/8, a carbon fiber tripod, etc. is bizzaar.
Different strokes for different folks. I've seen too many David Muench and Michael Fatali exhibitions to take a casual attitude about what some folks would deem unnecessary extremes to try to get the best possible resolution for the sharpest possible large prints. Family snapshots work fine with disposable film cameras. Very large fine art photography prints require another standard altogether and then there's everything in between, with everybody seeming to think that whatever position on the scale their style or economic constraints dictate is the "smartest" position, with those settling for less being undiscriminating and those insisting on more being unnecessarily fussy.
For now I'm quite happy with my 1ds, Zeiss lenses, and CF tripods. As soon as better stuff becomes available and I can afford it (even only marginally) I'll go for it, until (if ever) portable digital gets as good as LF film. I don't give a rat's ass what anyone else may deem good enough for themselves. I know what my ultimate aim is for myself, thank you.
"Bizaarr" would probably rate at least an honorable mention in any bizarre spelling contest.
Since larger formats use longer lenses to cover the same FOV, you can get away with f/64 instead of f/8 because you're using a 300mm lens instead of a 24mm to get the same FOV. But the physical aperture diameter where diffraction starts becoming an issue is roughly the same in either case.
OK, THIS makes sense and it means mathematical abstractions notwithstanding that a given composition with MF will give you a larger sharp print and no disporportional DOF and diffraction losses. Everything increases proportionately as image size and lens size gets bigger. Diffraction is what happens when light hits a sharp edge and the smaller the hole, the more the image will be affected, and yes indeed, a larger camera/lens will result in a bigger absolute aperture diameter at the same RELATIVE f stop.
And Howard, please don't be bothered if some of us want to do everything possible for improved technical quality. That's just our personal preference and not something we're trying to push on you, just as your love affair with rules of composition is your personal preference and should not be pushed on us. To each his own. Jonathan and I are both very prolific and very happy with our photography efforts and in no way crippled or compromised by our technical quality obsession. De Gustibus... and all that.
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I didn't read all the posts so far, but seem to have got to the point that the bigger the hole the less diffraction (OK, I know this - basic physics 101).
What happens though if we go to a lens which is purely based upon principles of diffraction rather than refraction and instead of adjusting the size of one hole we add or subtract holes to increase the amount of light entering or leaving the system. In this case we do not become diffraction limited and can use the diffraction effect to bend the light to the focal point. It all gets a little complex with the interference properties against frequency; however, Canon employ this principle in their DO lenses and perhaps it will enable us with the 35mm system to exceed the performance constraint of current lenses.
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For barely acceptable appearance in shadows a local S/N ratio at individual shadow pixels of about ten is needed according to Kodak, and as Ray indicates, this needs at least 100 electrons counted just to overcome photon shot noise. (Other noise sources push the practical lower limit up). If your well capacity is about 100,000 (as for current medium format back sensors), that optimistically gives a range of about 100 to 100,000, or 1,000:1, or about ten stops from highlights to darkest decently reproduced shadow areas.
I had no idea the numbers were so low. I had always assumed that captured photons were like electrons in current, so #### many that counting them was a challenge.
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Use your histogram.
Expose to the left.
If you have the ability to greatly extend the camera's DR you won't blow out the highlights.
Don't you mean, expose to the right? I don't see this as a solution. This is just normal practice isn't it?
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Use your histogram.
Expose to the left.
If you have the ability to greatly extend the camera's DR you won't blow out the highlights.
This is absolutely stupid advice. You're gaining highlight headroom by pushing shadow detail beneath the noise floor. In all cases, the best image quality and dynamic range is obtained when non-specular highlights approach, but do not reach the clipping point. Exposing to the left reduces DR by effectively raising the noise floor of the data.
Imagine a scene with 5 stops of dynamic range. If your camera has a 5-stop exposure interval between clipping and the noise floor, you can just barely capture the entire scene if you expose to the right and push the highlights right to the ragged edge of clipping. But if you underexpose by 1 stop, you've just reduced your captured DR from 5 stops to 4 stops because you've thrown away 1 stop of shadow detail by burying it in the noise. If you overexpose by 1 stop, you've also captured 4 stops of the scene because 1 stop worth of highlight detail is clipped away.
If the scene has only 4 stops of DR, a capture with the highlights close to clipping will have less grain and noise and more detail than a capture of the same scene with the shadows barely higher than the noise floor.
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Price is determined by other factors than quality. If I could make a lens as good as a Zeiss, it would likely be too expensive to sell, or I would have to lose money on it.
Well, we know that lenses as good as a Zeiss can be made.
It occurs to me there may be a very good reason other than my 'paranoid' suspicions why Canon hasn't built an 'Uber L' wide angle lens for the 1Ds II.
To get true WA for the Canon FF sensor one would have to put the equivalent of the Contax 645 AF 35mm (but in a 15mm or 20mm version) lens on a camera containing the Canon FF sensor but having a full throated 645 mount.
Obviously this will never happen. So it may be that folks wedded to WA photography should stick with view cameras (6 x 9cm would be enough) and use lenses with at least twice the image circle of the sensor.
Just guessing.
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Thinking about the sensor issue, it dawned on me that the Fuji 3 is an interesting solution.I've seen very few in depth reviews yet. The whole concept is interesting with two sensor fields overlayed with each other with a sensor sensitivity difference and the sensor points of different size. The large sensor is significantly larger than the small (could it may be possible the wiring (?) is all located on the small site. Tight sensor packing for sure. It seems that the two sensor differences in sensitivity should be understood and may account for the 2 stop claim in extended DR.
I wonder if the fact that the claims are not easily seen by early adopters are a result of underdeveloped processing software. There are 12+ million data collection sites, so it should be a 12+ megapixel camera. The overlap of sensitivities, means to me that the camera is 12 megapixel in the middle zones and 6 megapixel in the extreme highlight and shadows where one array or the other is outside of its intended range. Maybe improvements in software will give us a high megapixel Uber camera if the processing can be sorted out.
bob
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After following this thread for some time i think i am not alone in stating the obvious answer. It is, without question...
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Shaan
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You sure?
Folks who will pay $30k for a digital back shouldn't have a problem with $5k lenses.
Yeah! Dead sure. It's really a matter of how many people there are there throughout the world (we're in a global community here) who would buy a $5000 Zeiss lens or $30,000 digital back if the price were, say 1/5th.
If there are not many, then it's no go. If there are heaps, and I suspect there are, then it will eventually happen.
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Quite possible. From what I hear from pro PJs, it isn't that the 1ds is so great, it is the instant image of digital that matters.
Howard,
Near my London office there is an exhibition of photos taken by leading photographers using mobile phone cameras. As I walked around the exhibition, I had this uncomfortable feeling I was being transported to the future, where this kind of photography was not a novelty, but a daily reality. For some reason it was oddly depressing.
Strange.
Quentin
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Light (as with all electromagnetic radiation) has characteristics of both a particle and a wave, and the physical size of the particle-like aspects of light (photons) is related to the wavelength of the light. Photons are not infinitely small. If you try to make a photodetector smaller than the wavelength of the light is is intended to detect, the efficiency of the detector will decrease dramatically as the size of the detector falls below the size of the photons it is trying to detect. It's kind of like trying to stuff a rubber ball through a hole; when the hole becomes smaller than the ball, the difficulty increases rapidly as the hole gets smaller.
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So here's the question: Are the top line affordable cameras -- say the Canon 1DsMII -- good enough in producing 13x19 prints, that it's going to be a long time before newer cameras can produce better 13x19 prints?
I'm willing to make the switch to Canon, but I'd be less willing if I were convinced that the 1DsMII is just another one-year temporary waypost on the way to a real camera.
JC
The 1Ds MKII "affordable"? I know all is relative, but this is still a strange concept for me. If you are not happy with the big prints from this camera, then you will have to look outside of 35mm format.
What do you mean "a real camera"? This is as real as it gets...
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I see what you are saying Bob and Peter, and I can honestly say that I stand corrected. However, I can't see in the forceable future, a complete shutdown of digital photography evolution. There will always be something better, faster, lighter that can be built, and that there will be a market for.
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Come on Quentinn and BJL...
Are we honestly discussing present day reality .... or just tryin to win arguements?
It's not just the press pit ...
Primarily, my response was about refuting a blatantly invalid argument (a bit akin to those who trumpet ISO1600+ noise levels as the dominant measure of a camera's worth), since you offered the press pit alone as proof of a very broad claim, including it seems dominance over digital medium format options, as if the press pit has anything at all to do with that. The EOS-1D models currently dominate some important sectors of the market, but with total production levels of only a few thousand per month (I have read 2,000/mo 1Ds, about twice as many of the 1D, while total DSLR production is around 200,000/mo), it is clearly far from the whole picture.
There are plenty of areas in photography where Canon does not stand alone above all others, such as
- resolution and dynamic range, which are more important than speed to many landscape photographers.
Not only do MF backs outdo the EOS-1D series, but the much maligned Kodak DCS 14/n had an advantage in both resolution and dynamic range (as wel as price!) over the 1Ds, and quite likely the DCS SLR/* models still have that advantage in dynamic range (the unusual FillFactory sensors have an extremely large electron well capacity, giving them an excellent dynamic range despite their higher noise levels).
- High quality wide angle to normal lenses for the 99% of DSLRs with "sub APS-C sized" sensors. I think it is fairly clear that for those who cannot afford $4,000 and up for any of the EOS-1D series bodies, the Canon EF-S lenses (all zooms, mostly f/5.6 at the long end) do not match the overall speed, quality and selection of wide to normal lenses that Nikon and Olympus offer at shorter focal lengths with their DX and E system lenses. Olympus at least has indicated that more top of the line prime and zoom E system lenses are coming this year, while there is no hint of any EF-S prime lenses for example.
Given that sales and revenues in this price sector are vastly greater than those with 35mm format sensors, this can hardly be ignored.
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OK Johnathan,
Take my #100 bet. I'm betting that you are 90% wrong. Of course it's a long term bet as It will take three years to prove out.
Did the price of the new 1Ds II come down from the first 1Ds? No it did not. Did not Phase One raise the MP of their backs over Kodak by 6M and more than double the price?
These are the trends. Not what you keep predicting.
First of all, the time frame for my prediction was ten years, not three. An it's a fact that less than 10 years ago Kodak was selling a DSLR that was less capable than the DRebel and it cost ~$30000. I'll leave the digital price/performance ratio change between then and now as an exercise for the reader. The 1Ds cost $8000 when it was introduced. They're going for around $4000 on eBay now, just a little over 2 years later. What are the 16MP Kodak backs going for now? Way less than $25,000. The biggest and best will always be expensive, but 10 years from now, the biggest and best will probably be full-frame 8x10 and 100+ megapixels. And it may well cost $30,000, but a 22MP MF back will be WAY cheaper.
You are drinking the digital coolaide. Go out and shoot some film.
Film is too f---ing expensive. I shoot about 50,000 frames a year with my 1Ds. What's film & processing for that many frames of 6x7? Or even 645? I figure I've saved more than the cost of my 1Ds, 1D-MkII, my lenses, my Epson 7600, and all my computer crap, with about $20K left over, just in film I didn't have to buy and develop. BTW, that's why pros have no problem justifying the "outrageous cost" of a P25. In a busy studio, it only takes a few months to offset the $25K just in eliminated film costs, and then after that it's saving money. And then there's the workflow advantages and the quality improvement--an additional bonus.
You're the one drinking the kool-aid. The sky is not falling, and MF backs are hardly a dead-end market segment.
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So, how do medium and large format folks ever get pictures that are not seriously compromised by diffraction and extremely narrow DOF? Why do medium and large format large prints look so much better than 35mm? ...
There's a serious conflict between real life and math here, sort of like bumblebees being poorly designed for flight.
To the first question, perhaps you misunderstand me as saying that the DOF/diffraction trade-offs are worse for larger formats: I am saying that they are the same.
To the second question, I have no expertise, but at a guess some factors come from the lower degree of enlargement needed and the fact that not everything is scaled up in proportion to film format size: the same emulsion resolution and grain give finer resolution and grain on prints, and the lesser degree of enlargement also does some "noise smoothing" that can increase the ability to distinguish small tonal gradations by reducing the S/N ratio.
So do not get me wrong, I am fairly sure that you will get somewhat better results out of the best available MF digital system than from the best available 35mm format system.
And I expected that sooner or later, someone would mention that annoying anti-scientific urban legend about physics proving that a bee cannot fly. It is perhaps apropriate that a mathematician/physicist debunk this to a biologist in a forum about photography:
What was actually proven was that a bee could not fly if its wings were rigid, so that it is important that they flex in flight. Later, high speed photography confirmed this prediction about bee wing flexing, and such flexing is important in the design of helicoptor rotor blades.
So, it was not a failure of theory at all, but an accurate and useful prediction which also reveals a wonderful adaption in the form of bee wings!
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IIRC, the effects of diffraction are related to physical aperture size
Yes, that is the way I like to look at it, especially when comparing different formats. The angular smearing of light passing through a small aperture depends on the aperture diameter: light spreads with the bulk of it within an angle of very roughly (wavelength of the light)/(aperture diameter), measured in radians. (Multiply by about 3000 to get it in minutes [corrected!] of arc.) For visible light this is about (0.0005)/(aperture in mm).
When it comes to prints of a given size and angular FOV, this angular spread is what counts; in a sense the aperture diameter sets a rough upper limit on the number of "lines per picture height" at which you can get decent resolution on a given subject. So when limiting diffraction effects on prints of a given size and subjects of a given FOV to a given level, longer focal lengths can use proportionately higher aperture ratios.
On the other hand, when comparig different focal lengths and FOV's used with the same format, it is relevant that the diffraction spot size on the film/sensor is proportional to both this angle and the focal length, so is proportional to aperture ratio. That is why photographic discussions of diffraction effects measure diffraction in terms of f-stops. And if one's goal is to get all the sharpness one can out of a given pixel size (as with Jonathan's approach to CoC) the upper f-stop limit is the same for all focal lengths.
Using a formula from this page at Norm Koren's site (http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF6.html) and the rough estimate that the resolution limit of a Bayer sensor is about one line pair per three pixels, we get that for the 9 micron pixel pitch of the original 1Ds and current MF backs (giving 22MP in current backs, about 30MP in full 645 format), diffraction has 50% MTF (one stop of contrast lost) at the sensor's resolution limit for about f/21. If one more optimistically believes that the sensor can resolve all the way to one line per pixel, this becomes f/14. So f/16 emerges as a pretty good rough limit if you wish to yield no significant resolution to diffraction.
Even then, most interesting detail is not right at the sensor's resolution limits, and this somewhat less fine detail is hardly affected by diffraction at all even at f/22 (or f/32). Remember that the sense of sharpness of an image usually has more to do with having very high MTF (50%, 80%?) for moderately fine details than with the finest detail that gets just barely resolved.
P. S. As soon as you back of from the edge of resolution limits and look for good holding of contrast (high MTF) in slightly less fine details, sensors and such might well give way to lens MTF performance as the main limiting factor. This is one respect in which MF lenses can have an advantage over 35mm format, often overlooked when we look at numerical measures of performance at the extremes.
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Wouldn't all of Didger's problems be solved if he just got in his truck and backed up a couple of miles?
Huh? I assume this is a put down, but I'm afraid I don't really grasp the cause or intent, but thanks for your concern.
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smaller sensors; smaller, lighter, cheaper, and easier to build lenses.
'Fraid not. That would only be true if the resolution didn't need to be increased to match the smaller sensor sites. Increasing the resolution of the sensor means to take decent advantage of that the lenses need to be correspondingly improved in resolution. That means tighter design specifications, tighter manufacturing procedures, much less tolerance for error anywhere in the process and finally much tighter quality control and also much better build so things don't start to shift after the lens leaves the factory. Since build and sample variation problems are already huge with present day lenses and most of them are inadequate to take anywhere near full advantage of a 1dsMKII, there's little hope for much better lenses than that right around the corner.
Let's go back to Michael's review of the 1D MkII (with L glass) and the also 8 meg Pro 1.
That little cheap Pro 1 lens did a pretty good job of keeping up with the L.
And those 8 megs of Pro 1 photo sites sure are tighter packed....
(Now Digger, you ought to be clamoring for things to move in the direction of smaller sensors/smaller lenses. Imagine sticking a 22 meg camera in your shirt pocket on a future trip high into the mountains.)
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I would say it the better manufactures are absolutely state of the art. Its the cost compromises one must make that determines final lens capability.
Who's going to buy a $20,000 wide zoom?
Judging by comments on such forum as this, there's a significant variation in quality amongst lenses of the same model and price. It becomes very expensive if a manufacturer sets up a quality control system of such a high standard that say 50% of all lenses are junked because they don't meet that minimum high standard.
Far better, I would think, to test each lens in the factory (instead of the occasional one or two from each batch) and grade and price according to quality.
Instead of an RRP of $1000 for each and every lens, a lens could come in 3 flavours; $2000 for the few that are spot on; $1000 for the bulk of them that are average, and $500 for those near the lower end of the QC range. Total revenue the same.
Mind you, such precision might take the fun out of buying a lens. With current arrangements, buying a lens is almost like buying a lottery ticket :D .
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The bottom line is, the is no free lunch.
There's a lot, lot more than free lunches. There's lottery tickets.
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Bob, on the whole I agree with your well thought out synopsis and I congratulate you for the fortitude to read the whole thread. As for the goodies coming up, the one weakness remains lens technology. True, DXO type software can help and may help more in the future, but lens sample variations (of neccesity even greater as physical dimensions become smaller) will limit this and the process is in any case severely limited. Let's say that a small red spot in a subject is substantially too small for what the lens can resolve and no red gets "triggered" in the sensor. No software in the world can give you that red information if it never gets into the data stream. A tiny little blurry red blob can be more intellegently sharpened than what non lens specific software can do, but you can't create something out of nothing at all. There's limits to what software can do and if all these sensor miracles can really be done, then the physical lens constraints will continue to be the bottleneck, just as they already are with 1ds to some degree and much more for 1dsMKII.
Your 95% figure is probably pretty close. I assume that when it was all film cameras, MF and LF were no more than 5%, with the rest being 35mm of all levels and also polaroid and various other consumer formats. No matter how good that 12-17 Mpixels in small formats gets, I'm more interested in what will happen with that 5%. I don't expect huge price drops, but I do expect that fairly soon very serious MF and maybe even eventually 4x5 digital will get down to way under $25,000 and that there will be the same sort of vigorous development and competitition there once was for film MF. 5% is not nothing and there's the prestige of a company having camera that most people can't afford, but all drool over. I'm not so willing to write off Mamiya as the company that will show the rest the way.
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You sure?
Folks who will pay $30k for a digital back shouldn't have a problem with $5k lenses.
Yeah! Dead sure. It's really a matter of how many people there are there throughout the world (we're in a global community here) who would buy a $5000 Zeiss lens or $30,000 digital back if the price were, say 1/5th.
If there are not many, then it's no go. If there are heaps, and I suspect there are, then it will eventually happen.
You guys are in love with the idea of owning a 22 meg back.
What if Canon hits the market with the 2Ds - 24 megs? And they bring it to market at or below 1Ds prices.
Or if Kodak figures out their 14x problems and markets the 24x? And for $4K.
How much demand do you think there is going to be for high quality lenses?
(And let me change the "ifs" to "whens"....
Realistically there can't be $10 worth of material in a lens. Some glass, some metal. A bit of paint. (OK, I don't really don't know about the $10 figure, but it can't be much.)
Tool up for extremely high quality they'll fly out the door.
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The most amazing thing to me was the photo was taken with a MF camera on an airplane 65,000 feet above the golf course and traveling at 1200 mph. That was 40 years ago and film. How good can digital get?
Well, "they" are now reading license plates from earth orbit. And that's just the stuff which is publicly acknowledged.
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The biggest I have heard of is a bit more than 50MP, in a very large sensor from Fairchild I think
Were they shooting RAW? :p :p
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I may have used a bit of hyperbole' in my description. Then just what is light, a wave w/o mass or a photon which does (infinitely small but ?) I don't know, thats for sure.
I think many are confused on the effect of light on a sensor, relating to film which I see as an incorrect way to evaluate the data. I see the sensor not seeing light and reacting with an on or off result (film grain) but a "number" which is the result of the accumulation of light during the period of shutter opening. It outputs that number (modified by a filter on top of the sensor to get the sense of what the color could be) and calculates a result. I like the Fuji approach of having two overlapping fields so that one sensor field is less sensitive than the other. They can calculate the difference or calibrate the difference.
It should provide additional headroom by the differential between the two fields. Now why Fuji used the approach of using a tiny sensor to do this, I don't quite comprehend. If I wanted to reduce the light hitting a sensor I could reduce the collection area (Fuji way) or add additional filtering (ND) to slow the accumulation of light. Either should reduce the light accumulation rate (a number) which could be factored up post exposure and would provide a valid result when the more sensitive field hits the ceiling and goes outside of its operating range.
If the tiny sensor only operates in the upper zones , then its a 6 mpxl camera. If it operates full range with a 2 zone offset, then its a 12 mpxl camera with 6mpxl extreme highlights..
I have been primarily a B&W photographer for 30+ years and since I have had a maleable dynamic range to work with, I find the expansion of DR very important. Had I been a color (transparency) photographer, I might look at this differently.
Can one go over 255 (or obviously offset the data).
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****Have you had a secret sneak preview of ZD, and found it lacking?****
No. I've seen the 1Ds II and know Mamiya can't match it.
Well, your absolute knowledge in the absence of any actual facts (that I've been privy to) is simply remarkable. I wouldn't dream of betting against such confidence, though I still don't share this confidence myself, since I've had no miraculous revelations either way.
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As soon as I have the money I will spend up to $5k for a mint Plaubel Veriwide 100. Or maybe an Alpa. Screw digital.
You can have a mint Veriwide for $1000 from Ralph Fuerbringer in NY. He did one for me, and I am a very satisfied user. I even have a second one with a Horseman 6x9 back and the newer Schneider SA 5.6/47. The Veriwide is so small that you can take it anywhere in your pocket for snapshots, just like a Leica. The other one is for more serious landscape work with a tripot. Digital is out of the question for me, period.
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canonites are gonna hate me..(6) but i dont like cameras that cant autofocus straight (backfocus) and give me a plasticky creamy fake color
i would rathger stick to film than deal with digital if canon was the only digi company out there
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The number of megs will most likely continue to increase and prices will likely continue to fall. But the number of megs, just like the clock speed of computers may well become less of an issue within the near future. People are going to start hitting their "personal enough" levels and won't be tempted to upgrade just to get more pixels that they won't/will seldom use.
Hi there,
Another little discussed reason why more MP will stop to make sense very soon is hand shake...
I have never seen a serious 1Ds vs 1DsMKII for hand held shooting, but I am 90% sure that there is virtually no resolution advantage for the 1DSMKII when shooting hand held in most situations.
For all the people shooting handheld, the only solution will be to go for larger sensors and MF is then the only option. Here also, we are probably close to the limit though.
Regards,
Bernard
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**** It was interesting to read Kev Raber of Phase 1 say that "Medium format systems and even present DSLR system will keep their price points.****
Yeah, I bet everyone here went back and read that sentence twice.
****That is a trend I have seen with higher end products; certain markets (e.g. MF studio photographers) seem to have acceptable price points, and one strategy is to keep product lines at various such price points while improving quality.****
This is a marketing mistake. They are ignoring the tens of thousands of amateures doing fine art for the thousands who can afford 30k for a back now. They cannot stay alive at the present price point. 95% of their market will be satisfied and thus saturated with 22MP and not upgrade. They will keep shooting with the back they have. When I say 95% I've already lopped off the huge segment that will say "screw this" I can do everything I need to do with the 1Ds Mk whatever.
The Mk II is a Phase One killer. If they don't get the price point down ... way down. They will cease to exist as MF back manufacturers.
I suspect Kevins statement (maybe he actually believes it) is mostly an attempt to squeeze out a few more sales at the absurd prices now listed.
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P. S. About my qualifications: I am a professor of applied mathematics, and publish in mathematics and physics journals on topics related to wave propagation, so vaguely related to the topic at hand. The questions at hand only depend on the lens optics and geometry that I learnt as an undergraduate, not the internal physics of sensors.
Well your math regarding sensor size/format and its effect on DOF is wrong; larger formats do have innately less DOF when all else is equal. See this post (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/cgi-bin/forum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=3;t=1105;st=20;&#entry30) for the proof.
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"Perhaps the evil effects of diffraction are being over-estimated here."
In my opinion, yes indeed. Sometimes when reading this forum, I get the idea that even attempting to take a decent photograph without a Canon 1ds, a Zeiss prime lens at f/8, a carbon fiber tripod, etc. is bizzaar.
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Wouldn't all of Didger's problems be solved if he just got in his truck and backed up a couple of miles?
Huh? I assume this is a put down, but I'm afraid I don't really grasp the cause or intent, but thanks for your concern.
Not a put-down. It's just that you seem especially concerned about performance in your wide and ultra-wide lenses, and see, if you just got in your truck and backed up...never mind.
JC
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John Camp,
yours sounds like a number of ideas that seem plausable or are even being tried.
Some sensor technologies do allow repeated rapid successive read out of photosites, so a slow read followed by a faster one could be possible. This would probably involve replacing the physical focal plane shutter by purely electronic shutter operation. (Electronic shuttering is already used in some CCD based DSLRs to get flash sync at 1/500s. So far CMOS DSLR sensors can not do this.)
Fuji is currently trying a variant where the second lower exposure shot is done simultaneously with a second set of smaller, less sensitive "S" photosites placed in small gaps between the main "R" ones, effectively giving a dark and light version of the same image, which can then be blended.
I have read about yet another variant on this being tried at Stanford; reading each photosite many times, every 1/10,000s or so, during an exposure, and then adding up the signals. This could eliminate full electron wells and blown out highlights, and so extend dynamic range arbitrarily at the bright end; only sensitivity at the shadow end would be left as a limiting factor.
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Wouldn't it be fairly simple (conceptually, at least) to create a moveable back for 35mm that would resolve a lot of DOF problems?
Conceptually at least creating a movable back, yes, why not. If it can be done for LF, there's no conceptual barriers for DSLR's, but the mechanics might get pretty nasty and pretty expensive and make a 1ds still bigger and heavier.
K-Minolta has already put a movable sensor in some of its cameras. It's now a matter of installing proper controls and possibly increasing the range of movement.
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I haven't seen anyone argue that lenses couldn't be better. If that's true then it's an issue of the market demanding better lenses.
It's hard for me to believe that lens manufacturing is state of the art. There's no way that there should be significant variation between similar lenses if current technology were fully applied.
As sensors become more 'packed' and as people continue to share information on the web it should become worthwhile for lens manufacturers to step up to the plate and start delivering 21st century glass.
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Buying a lottery ticket increases your probabilty of winning only very slightly. Someone will win the lottery, just not you. The point was you get what you pay for. Seldom more, maybe less if you aren't careful.
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Well, we know that lenses as good as a Zeiss can be made.
So given enough market demand one of the manufactures is going to revise their manufacturing process to crank out a flow of them.
Demand is inextricably linked to price. If there's little demand for $5000 zeiss lenses it's precisely because they cost $5000.
Reduce the price to $1000 and you're in business and Canon is worried.
How do you get the price down to $1000? You set up a state-of-the-art lens manufacturing process in China.
Dead simple really. We benefit from the low prices. China benefits from the acquisition of state-of-the-art technology.
Same principle applies to $30,000 Phase 1 backs. Will it ever happen? Probably, although sometimes there's a political obstacle to exporting the latest technology if it has a military use.
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Pom is completely right that improving the sensor (I include film as a type of sensor) cannot make a lens perform worse than before; all it can do is give you an opportunty or desire to improve quality even more by spending even more on new, supposedly better lenses, such as ones touted as "digital friendly" even though they are also 35mm compatible.
If the conventional wisdom is true that camera makers derive a large share of profits from lenses and other accessories then Canon, Nikon et al might be pushing ever increasing sensor resolution partly as a stategy to get people to upgrade lenses; either from mid-priced models to the current top of the line, or from existing fine lenses to ones boasting improvements for the sake of working better with digital. Note for example the claims made by Nikon about improved flare control and such in its forthcoming 300/2.8 VR lens, and similar claims from Canon, Olympus and third party lens makers about "digital friendly" design features of many recent lenses.
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The bottom line is, to get detail from the shadows one simply has to gather more photons from the shadows, and there are only 2 ways I can think of to achieve this; increase exposure time or open up the aperture.
Use your histogram.
Expose to the left.
If you have the ability to greatly extend the camera's DR you won't blow out the highlights.
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pom, I was on the ground. The camera was on a US military recon aircraft.
License plates from earth orbit? And that is just the stuff "they" tell us about. So how do you suppose digital consumer cameras will be in another 40 years? Heck, 10 years.
Quintin, the best photographer I know personally still uses a Leica range finder 35mm camera, 2 lenses (35 and 85ish), and no meter. Back to the future. I expect he could take some very great images with a 2mp shoephone camera. (Max Smart reference, but folks of our vintage know that.)
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Hasn't there been very high resolution digital cameras in spy satellites since the late '70s?
I'm sure there are some people in NASA who are still rolling in laughter as people get excited about the new advances in 8mp 1.6x DSLR sensors, circa 2005...
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I do not see this as a problem. The small R pixels are meant to detect only a small fraction of the light available, so as not to fill their wells until several stops beyond the level where the S pixels are full.
Do you think the small pixels are used full range or just at the higher zones? The amount of information on this system sure is sketchy.
I have a D2x on order (number 7 on the store committment list) but I want a throw around camera for "in country" and as a backup. Sorry for staying on the topic so long!
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Would anyone agree that what canon should be doing is bringing out a 'fast' 1D series body with FF and 11-16 megapixels? It would be the obvious next step to amalgamate the 1D and 1Ds cameras and declare the race over in the pro DSLR stakes.
The problem is that since canon has split it's pro level bodies into two complementary divisions, lightening fast sports/action/journalist 1D and the landscape/studio take on Med format 1Ds, and are happily meeting and exeeding demand on both types of bodies, from a marketing point of view they would be happier to carry on this split instead of combining the two factors and cutting profits.
Another point would be that sports/action/journalist photographers would rarely need above 8 megapixel cameras, they were happy enough with the original 1D at 4meg, and sending loads of very big files from the point of action to the newsdesks, when the filesizes are obviously overkill for their application, would mean that these photographer would not necessarily go for a higher res camera, at a higher price, but with no particular gain.
Whether the 1Ds mark III will be 22 megapixels and the 1D mark III will be FF or not, I cannot see canon amalgamating these lines into one DSLR body within the next generation of high end pro DSLR's, and probably not for a bit after that either. Of course once Canon has 'won' and created the ultimate 35mm DSLR the prices will stabilise and their profit margin will sink as the the cameras get updated once every 5-10 years as opposed to the current 2 years or so and are bought accordingly.
I'm waiting for the 1D Mark II to become available at under $2000 or so on the 2nd hand market (another year and a half till the next model comes out?) and I think that it may be my final DSLR. I get incredible prints from my 10D, so 8meg will be fine for me especially with the larger photosites. The ETTL II will be a welcome break after having to get the flash right every time with manual FEC for each shot, and most importantly, the 1.3X factor is almost fill frame (popular focal lengths were popular because they were convenient for their task due to their FOV/DOF, the 1.6X factor screws that up completely when my 17-40, although it has the same FOV, has far too much DOF and distortion for event/wedding photography).
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You're right pom. Sorry, I should have probably left that topic alone, since I don't know anything about it.
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I don't deny any of your arguements though none of them negate mine. I'm just saying the Pro DSLR camera market is dangerously unbalanced and it does not bode well for us. If Mamiya does no better than Kodak (14N) with it's attempt at 22MP sensor cameras it could very well be the last stab at any real competition to Canon.
This is NOT just another wrinkle in the ever fluctuating ebb and flow of the market. It's a tidal wave sweeping all before it. It isn't simply Canon's dominance that is so unnerving. It is what that dominance will lead to.
Healthy competition in markets is what maintains them as places where consumers can still breathe and thrive. I believe I can already see ... it's plain as day ... that we have passed the point where this positive, balanced equilibrium exists and perhaps it has even gone so far that it can never be reestablished.
If Canon thought they needed to cater to us in any way they would give us decent WA prime lenses. ALso, say goodbye to the Pollyanna belief that prices will come back down to something like film body levels. Never happen.
Most also seem to believe that MF digital is a growing aspect of the Pro DSLR world. I just don't. The price is too outlandish and it won't last as a market segment. The day of small highly specialist oriented companies is past. Past long ago. The corporate culture demands monster profits and high volume. Artistic endeavours making modest profits are not tolerated. Keep in mind it is an oriental corporate behemoth we are all bowing to.
There are still a few little companies out there (most in Europe) swimming against the tide but they will tire and drop away as have a thousand before them just in the last couple years.
Digital took photograpy into the realm of 'rocket science technology'. Only a few (three?) chip makers control the market and this is not a situation that will change. Some little upstart like Foveon could make a breakthrough but they will be bought out or forced to keep the prices high.
Usually these sorts of sea changes take decades to work their way into the fabric of the market and society. The digital revolution took less than ten years to turn everything upside down. That's just too fast. Too many are running down blind allyways. We're throwing away a whole world of photography with no regard to the consequences.
Oh well. Film will be around for my lifetime at least and all those wonderful old lowtech cameras are getting cheaper by the day. I'm sure glad photography is just my hobby.
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OK Johnathan,
Take my #100 bet. I'm betting that you are 90% wrong. Of course it's a long term bet as It will take three years to prove out.
Did the price of the new 1Ds II come down from the first 1Ds? No it did not. Did not Phase One raise the MP of their backs over Kodak by 6M and more than double the price?
These are the trends. Not what you keep predicting.
You are drinking the digital coolaide. Go out and shoot some film.
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To get really good DOF with an 8x10 camera, you may need to shoot at f64. Even at f16 the super sharp Canon 2.5 macro lens loses so much due to diffraction that a 1ds picture is the same as a 1dsMKII picture. So, if everything is proportional, then f64 with an 8x10 would mean extreme resolution loss due to diffraction.
I think that you are off by a factor of two there: f/64 in 8x10 gives about the same DOF as f/8 in 35mm (the linear size factor is about 8). So in a sense the 35mm slogan "f/8 and be there" is an echo of the f/64 movement. Yes, f/64 in 8x10 involves diffraction that overwhelms the resolution potential of modern films, but on prints of any given size, diffraction at f/64 in 8x10 is no more visible than from f/8 in 35mm.
Also, f/64 might not have sacrificed so much of the resolution of the emulsions available in the early days of the f/64 movement. Perhaps it was the improvement in emulsions, or just realizing that they had overeacted to pictorialist fuzziness in their choice of "f/64", which moved 8x10 users to more often use somewhat larger apertures than f/64, though this requires more emphasis on using view camera motions to get all of the main subject in sharp focus.
Or maybe that is why so many 8x10 users seem to be fond of grand, distant subjects, for which getting adequate DOF is easier: all you need is a hyperfocal distance of less than ten kilometers to make most mountains look sharp!
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****The fact is that today's best ultrawide lenses are not as good as those old Zeiss and Leica designs and there is no particular reason (except blind optimism) to think that there's any lens miracles in store any time soon.****
It wasn't very long ago that digital photography was unknown and the computer on your desk would have been the size of your house. "Miracles" happen. Maybe better better "glass" will not be glass.
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IIRC, the effects of diffraction are related to physical aperture size, so with longer lenses the same aperture diameter becomes a higher f/number. Since larger formats use longer lenses to cover the same FOV, you can get away with f/64 instead of f/8 because you're using a 300mm lens instead of a 24mm to get the same FOV. But the physical aperture diameter where diffraction starts becoming an issue is roughly the same in either case.
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Wow , a 100 posts. All in a few days too. I 'll add my two cents.
To me 15 (pick a number) megapixels are 15 megapixels. Assuming the camera and lens are in an acceptable range, I find the prints to be largely comparable. This assumes lighting conditions, a lens sharp enough to resolve a sharp image on the sensor, a sound non vibrating platform (tripod), and good exposure technique. Thats what techniqually makes an image. The photographer adds the interpretation and composition.
Now the way I see it is " the devil is in the details".
All cameras will work well on an acceptable foundation, so that parameter is ok.
Exposure is somewhat chip dependent, but largely on just three parameters, noise (speed), number (of pixels), and cost ($). I'll come back to this point.
The photographer is a wild card.
Whats left is the lens. Thats why when I so often read, that Nikon is dead, I just laugh. There is "no" way that a major, high quality, glass company with all the cost advantages of large scale production of quality product is going anywhere but to be a survivor in an industry shakeout. Any company who is a player in high quality glass has the ability (potential) to survive.
Now back to the chip thing. For the point of the moment lets put aside cost. So, then all we want a sensor to do is gather data. How much is dependent on final print size. So we can, based upon our largest print size we expect to print, select the amount of data needed. (We can now rationalize uprezing if we bring cost back in).
So much data to collect, whats the best way to collect it. I know I need _?_ pixels. What does a bigger chip do for us? It makes life easier on the lens. Big pixels are easier on the lens requirement than small pixels. That seems fairly intuitive.
What about pixel quality? This is where I'm convinced significant progress will be made. And in two ways, hardware and software. Hardware will somewhere out there run into a wall (the darn physics thing), I think we have a little way to go yet. Software (either on chip or camera) or in the raw (jpeg) converter has the potential to make chicken soup out of chicken ****. This has a long way to go IMHO. Not only manipulating the data but allowing better yield in chip making. Locking out bad sectors has been happening in Hard Drives for a long time. Elegant ways of locking out bad transistors on a chip will become feasable at some point to improve yields someday.
On to the final point, we should expect better quality but were getting close to enough is enough. We should see significant breakthroughts in cost, with the lens and sensor coming into equilibrum with final requirements meeting the output needed.
I for one find it "nuts" to pay the rediculous prices the industry has sold the photography industry on. Although early adopters have funded all technology companies. I remember my first PC, A DEC rainbow, $7000+ with two floppies and a 10 Meg HD. Great monitor but monochrome. In 1982 dollars no less.
I think the brand arguments are silly, the format sizes interesting, but in the end we just want quality data. The path is lens first, chip second.
Two points before I close.
The idea that Canon will kill everyone else because they are bigger is not how it works. Canon is a great company with a broad array of products. They invest their R&D dollars in a number of different product categories, from camera's to copiers, to printers, to.... You get the picture. Each division gets R&D (or marketing) dollars because of two reasons, 1)greatest return or 2) defending the turf against outsiders. I doubt cameras get unlimited funds
Lastly, the chip guys when there competitively behind will gang up on the leader. Sony getting in bed with Nikon and others is an example. Canon jumped out there, there going to have to fight to keep it. Otherwise we'll never have a reasonably priced highpixel camera to create the LL.
Whew, I don't know where that came from, just started typing, Thanks for your indulgence.
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Bob,
I will try to answer some of your questions. Firstly, this photon shot noise (roughly the square root of the number of photons counted) is unavoidable; it comes from fluctuations in the emission of light, and is random in time and space, so the only way to smooth it out is (a) temporal averaging, meaning longer exposure times, to count more photons ( spatial averaging or bigger photosites to again count more photons, meaning trading away some resolution. (Apparently, many digital cameras quietly do an increasing amount of such spatial smoothing on JPEG output as the ISO setting is increased.)
Is 3% significant? What matters when you look at any given part of a print is the local ratio of signal to noise at those particular pixels, not quite the same as Ray's calculation. A Kodak document suggests that for local S/N ratio at individual pixels, 40:1 and up looks excellent while 10:1 is about the low limit for "acceptable appearance".
This suggests to me that it would be a plausable goal to have 40:1 local S/N ratio in mid-tones, requiring at least 1600 photons counted at a mid-tone pixel (18% luminosity) and so about 10,000 photons for a pixel seeing a 100% luminosity part of the subject. For example, the sensor in the Olympus E-1 can match or surpass that at up to ISO 400, and this fits fairly well with the consensus that beyond that, ISO 800 and up, is where noise becomes somewhat noticable in E-1 prints.
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I haven't seen anyone argue that lenses couldn't be better.
That would be a tough argument, since at least ultrawides WERE better decades ago. It's not that lenses couldn't be better. It's that the whole 35mm market is dominated by gimmick intensive consumer goodies, rather than good solid optically excellent prime lenses without a lot of frills to add cost and subtract build and reliability. For landscape work give me good glass and good build with no automtion at all and no zoom. We'll die, say the marketing folks, and they'd probably be right. Fortunately the MF market is a little different and good primes are available in all focal lengths.
I do hope you're right that manufacturers will get their heads out of their butts soon and start delivering the lenses that I also think they're capable of. Sure, us Germans are pretty smart, but them Japanese engineers ain't all that dumb either. They're just not putting their efforts into good optics as the highest priority, that's all.
Even with full on max effort, though, there's a limit how small you can make lenses with sufficiently tight tolerances to match ultradense sensors. Your physical tolerances get smaller and smaller. Acceptable 10 micron slop of some lens parameter for one sensor might translate to acceptable slop of 2 microns for another. That might be the difference between very expensive quality control and totally impossible. Electronic miniaturization is orders of magnitude easier than machining, grinding, and fabrication and quality control to the same physical tolerances of accuracy. Lenses don't need to keep being the severe bottle neck they are today, but they'll always be the bottleneck without sci fi tech breakthroughs.
As for the sensor movement thing, there is the problem that sensor elements are greatly more sensitive to the angle of incidence of the light than film, so a lot of movement might not be feasible. In any case this very cumbersome and no doubt expensive and weight increasing possibility won't do that much for DOF in most circumstances.
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Let's say the camera takes 3-6 quick exposures to get the 'blend' shots.
Isn't this the problem? No quick exposure can capture detail in the shadows. If you want to blend images, you need one long exposure, one medium exposure and one quick exposure. Total time is one very long exposure.
Yes, this may be the downfall of that approach. But let me try one other idea.
Shadow areas don't throw off a lot of photons. The problem becomes separating the signal derived from those few photons from the inherent system noise.
If you had multiple frames to compare it might be possible to do a pixel by pixel analysis to determine which were the 'real' signals by their appearance across multiple frames.
This sound to me no more than what film scanners are already doing. My Nikon Coolscan allows multiple passes. Noise has a random nature. The scan with the least noise in one part of the image is combined with another scan with the least noise in another part of the image to produce a single result with marginally less noise in the shadows. But I emphasise, the improvement is marginal and the extra scanning time hardly justifies the results.
The bottom line is, to get detail from the shadows one simply has to gather more photons from the shadows, and there are only 2 ways I can think of to achieve this; increase exposure time or open up the aperture.
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The point was you get what you pay for. Seldom more, maybe less if you aren't careful.
That translates to my logical mind, you don't get what you pay for. On very rare occasions you get a million times what you pay for. More frequently you get double what you paid for and if you're unlucky you get less than what you paid for.
Perhaps most of the time you get what you paid for, but then there's China. When I buy a product made in China, I often get the feeling I'm getting more than I paid for.
The statements, 'you get what you pay for', or 'there's no free lunch', are definitely more imprecise than the 1/100th" rule.
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Well, we know that lenses as good as a Zeiss can be made.
So given enough market demand one of the manufactures is going to revise their manufacturing process to crank out a flow of them.
Demand is inextricably linked to price. If there's little demand for $5000 zeiss lenses it's precisely because they cost $5000.
Reduce the price to $1000 and you're in business and Canon is worried.
How do you get the price down to $1000? You set up a state-of-the-art lens manufacturing process in China.
Dead simple really. We benefit from the low prices. China benefits from the acquisition of state-of-the-art technology.
Same principle applies to $30,000 Phase 1 backs. Will it ever happen? Probably, although sometimes there's a political obstacle to exporting the latest technology if it has a military use.
You sure?
Folks who will pay $30k for a digital back shouldn't have a problem with $5k lenses.
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I've been in contact with the folks at Betterlight and have been exchanging emails with Mike Collette. The conversation was regarding the future of the scanning back. He has recently released a higher speed scanning back for his customers. I want to get as many high quality pixels for a personal project and I find the cost of 22 mpxl backs to beyond justification for this project. To keep the load light I want to use a medium format view camera (6x7 or 6x9) and I wanted to know if it was in their future. As it turns out the current scanning back is smaller than 4x5 and with some design and production adjustments can work in a small format view camera. Its something there investigating for the future.
OK you got me heavy breathing. Light weight, 48 (or more) megapixels, no bayer filter. Operating on of the new mini-laptops and setting the exposure with a custom profile on each subject (or shot). Thats my personal idea of high resolution "digital".
I'm ready!
Bob
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when I was the manager of a photo lab my boss, who used to own a chain in LA before he emigrated, knew most of the top Hollywood photogs of the time. He was extremely derisive of modern 'wanabee' wedding photographers. He said that a real photographer would be able to take a top class photo with a disposable camera, because they understood the light!
I can't say that he was that wrong....
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If the military had a 25Mpixel digital back 40ish years ago, how much better can/has digital get/gotten?
The biggest I have heard of is a bit more than 50MP, in a very large sensor from Fairchild I think; whether for purely military or also non-classified satellite imagery I do not know.
At some point, lenses become the limiting factor of course, but depth of field is not much of an issue in high altittude work so very large apertures with tiny amounts of diffraction can be used. Thus this is surely the ideal case for really big pixel counts. Still, maybe mosaicing of multiple images is more efficient beyond some point.
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I would say that the R pixel in Fuji's system is such a pixel. It's smaller than the resolving capabilities of the Nikon lenses and is therefore of limited usefulness.
... In any high DR situation, most of the light which would normally result in a blown highlight, is not being captured by the R pixels. It's falling everywhere else, much of it presumably overspill on the S pixels, and is essentially being wasted.
I do not see this as a problem. The small R pixels are meant to detect only a small fraction of the light available, so as not to fill their wells until several stops beyond the level where the S pixels are full. Even if they only detect 1/20th as many photons as the S pixels, they are only needed when the S pixels are blown out, which is at about 40,000 photons counted, so the R pixels would then be detecting at least 40,000/20 = 2000 photons, plenty to have a nice low S/N ratio (about the same as the S pixels detect at mid-tones at ISO 200.)
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Bob,
I did go out and start a second career in my retirement JUST to finance my photography. I spent 20k this year alone. I love shooting film. Gotta get my own scanner though. I wouldn't pay 30k for a DB if I had ten times my present capital because I'm not a pro and could never justify the expense.
I'm not miserable. I just think digital is obscenely overpriced.
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Thanks. I just emailed Mr. Fuerbringer. We'll see what happenes. I found this site on Plaubels:
http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/veriwide.html (http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/veriwide.html)
Know any other good ones?
Yes I could see just from my limited study that tha later f/5.6 47mm SA would be preferable. So the camera was never originally made with this lens? As to your Horseman back? What is the advantage to this? 220 over 120?
Check out this website, that's where I've got the idea of my second camera.
http://www.bigcamera.com/ (http://www.bigcamera.com/)
The Veriwide was made in two versions, but with the same 8/47 lens, first by Plaubel and than the Brooks version, which you also find at medfmt.8k,com, but that back had some isues.
As to Horseman backs, the advantage is they are interchangable with any other size, or Graflex backs, even 6x12 is a possibility.
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Technology marches on. Money has to be made. People have to upgrade. Salesmen and advertising agencies will continue to promote the superior product.
The number of megs will most likely continue to increase and prices will likely continue to fall. But the number of megs, just like the clock speed of computers may well become less of an issue within the near future. People are going to start hitting their "personal enough" levels and won't be tempted to upgrade just to get more pixels that they won't/will seldom use.
We may have already hit that level with the middle of the road shooter, those people who rarely print larger than 8x12. It's going to take a lot more pixels than the current 20D-type camera to get them to part with another $1500.
The pressure is likely to be applied to manufacturers to produce cameras with more dynamic range, less noise, better viewfinders and cameras that are smaller and lighter.
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Yes, Howard, you're belaboring the obvious, the very obvious. However, what's not so obvious is that if diffraction and DOF considerations are exactly proportionately the same for large and small formats, then you should lose most of what that big sensor or film size gains you. To get really good DOF with an 8x10 camera, you may need to shoot at f64. Even at f16 the super sharp Canon 2.5 macro lens loses so much due to diffraction that a 1ds picture is the same as a 1dsMKII picture. So, if everything is proportional, then f64 with an 8x10 would mean extreme resolution loss due to diffraction. Same consideration for DOF. A little blurriness to to marginal DOF adequacy would mean extreme blurriness of almost everything except the exact place where the lens focuses perfectly in a very large print from a very large format camera unless you're viewing from such a large distance that you might as well have made that same size print from a smaller sensor image.
I hope that Kevin or BJL can explain this paradox. The fact is indeed that you can make larger sharper prints from larger format cameras in spite of presumably more severe DOF losses and diffraction losses. I haven't noticed any less DOF or obvious diffraction degradation in large format prints. Why not? Bumble bees fly and large format cameras work, so I tend to not trust the math that conflicts with the reality.
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Well your math regarding sensor size/format and its effect on DOF is wrong; larger formats do have innately less DOF when all else is equal. See this post (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/cgi-bin/forum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=3;t=1105;st=20;&#entry30) for the proof.
I am editing this response since I misunderstood the source of Jonathan's misunderstanding. The problem is that he understood me to be comparing at the "same aperture ratio" when I thought that I had been very careful to say that I was comparing different formats when using the same APERTURE DIAMETER, which involves changing the aperture ratio in the same proportion as the focal length is changed. How much bold face and capitalization do I have to use to keep these things straight?
References: Norm Koren gives some useful defintions, formulas and other information about DOF in his page on DOF and diffraction (http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF6.html), part of his nice technical essay on Understanding Image Sharpness and MTF (http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF.html)
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In my opinion, yes indeed. Sometimes when reading this forum, I get the idea that even attempting to take a decent photograph without a Canon 1ds, a Zeiss prime lens at f/8, a carbon fiber tripod, etc. is bizzaar.
To my chagrin, my most sold picture, and the one that everyone raves about was taken at the very beginning of my entry into photography, on a Canon A1 with a Vivitar 28-200 on Fuji 200 print film at f22 on a crappy tripod. It drives me mad when I sell so many of this print when pictures taken with a Mamiya 645 with the sharpest lenses, Velvia 100F and a solid tripod just sit there. I think it says something though.
There are many who keep harping on about how the 1Ds II shows up most lenses, etc. I think that if you were to immediately size the print at the beginning of the workflow, and then click on 'print size' and work from there you would be pretty happy! Looking at 100% will of course show up any problems, but then who the heck prints that big?
Someone has already mentioned that there are modern films, especially B&W which outresolve most if not all of the the lenses out there, why did we not care then but we nitpick endlessly now? As Micheal has been saying a lot recently, 'it's in the print!', who cares how it looks at maximum magnification.
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"... engineering of bumble bees and that MF will give me much better results ... ."
It is true that bumble bees can fly only because they don't know they can't. Then again, depending on the job, a bumble bee can't even come close to matching a humming bird. Right tool for the job. Define the job, then select a tool. Or, select a tool and do what it will do. Both work. INUO and YMMV.
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help development
If you can tell me what it is we're trying to "develop", I can perhaps be more helpful.
We're all just speculating about the future and we still can't prove any of it until the future arrives. "Credibility"? This means the same as "believability" and we can each believe exactly what we want. I think the constitution guarantees that. Your technical speculations have credibility? For who? On what basis?
I stand by all my predictions and you'll just have to be a little patient about discrediting me.
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It's hard for me to believe that lens manufacturing is state of the art. There's no way that there should be significant variation between similar lenses if current technology were fully applied.
I would say it the better manufactures are absolutely state of the art. Its the cost compromises one must make that determines final lens capability.
Who's going to buy a $20,000 wide zoom? The differences between the companies are made up of how they manage these compromises and how they market them. Unit volume has much to do with the cost to manufacture. I don't think there will ever be a "significant" and "cost effective" improvement in lens capability over today. It's somewhat of a mature industry. The future is in electronics and image processing within the framework of the older technology.
My sense it's stalled or even possibly going the other way with more and more restrictions on metals, etc that can be used in glass production.
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Then there would be $2000 lenses that were only a tad better than the best $1000 lens. "I payed twice as much as you did, and I can't see any difference. What a rip off."
MAybe everyone woulf be happier if they just assumed they would get the worst example, and anything better is a steal.
I see an ethical problem with cherry picking. I'm proposing that the factory should do the cherry picking and make the user pay. My illustration of just 3 grades is a bit crude. How about 6 grades; $2000, $1750, $1500 etc.
The unavoidable fact is, when you buy a seat in the concert hall, there is always going to be just one row difference between one price category and the next. It's a matter of utility. The greatest satisfaction for the greatest number of people within a system that is both efficient and fair.
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This wasn't exactly a "light bulb" moment, but some time ago I bought a Canon Pro1 point-and-shoot with a 7x zoom as a briefcase camera. I didn't think about it much, just let it rattle around in my bag, then just before Christmas I shot a routine, head-on, auto-mode flash-photo of my wife standing in the living room holding up a crib quilt she'd made for our daughter. A couple days ago, I knocked out a 13x19 print on my Epson 2200, having spent about 0.5 minutes on the shot in Photoshop. When my wife got it she remarked not only on the color accuracy (she had scraps of the quilt to compare) but on the fact that you can clearly see the individual quilting stitches. This with a consumer camera. It ain't a great shot, but it occurred to me to wonder exactly what I'm hoping/expecting/demanding to get from better lenses and sensors...Maybe the ability to make loupe-quality 3-foot-by-five-foot shots?
JC
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Quinten,
"The bigger threat to Canon, and Nikon, may instead come from 'new' formats that are 'good enough' for photojournalism, sport and consumer use - possibly 4/3, or maybe something completely different, leaving 35mm size sensors caught between two stools."
Quite possible. From what I hear from pro PJs, it isn't that the 1ds is so great, it is the instant image of digital that matters. How many newspapers/magazines need 1ds quality images? There was a story back when digital was still newish that a PJ for the LA Times was in Calgary for a playoff hockey game between the OPilers and Kings. The game went into OT. The local PJ and the LA Times both got the winning goal. But the Times took the digital image, e-mailed it to LA and it made the morning paper in LA. The Calgary paper didn't have the time to process the image and make the local paper. Look at the sales of phone/cameraS. HArdly 1ds quality, but the total sales $ will likely be much greater than the 1ds and 1dsII combined. (Pure speculation.)
Canon Nikon wouldn't be the first biggy caught napping. Kodak took a real shot to the jaw by digital and is trying to catch up.
I have thought for a while that "35mm," "MF", and "LF" are film terms. Who cares about sensor size when looking at a print? I would guess that the vast majority of digital camera owners know or even care how big the sensor is. It's the picture that counts. How big could a sensor get and still fit inside a cell phone? I would be surprised if you could easily see a cell phone if it didn't need keys big enough to see and touch and a screen to match.
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As for 18x12 prints being just fine with whatever kind of lens, sure, but what if I want to print really sharp looking 30x40 even for a reasonable viewing distance? I'll need to go beyond anything like present day 35mm lenses (especially ultrawide).
Which is why I'm sure you will be one very happy man when you get that ZD!!
Canon may be upgrading the sensors, but as everyone is pointing out, the limitation factor is now the lenses. Ergo, medium format will come back in to it's own for the market it was intended for, i.e. bigger prints.
That said, until the med format prices come down, this forum will still be awash with those complaining about canon's WA's not being up to a job they were never intended for. (the lenses that is, when they designed the 16-35L it wasn't with the 1Ds Mark V, LF replacement, in mind!)
Digital really is great, but the apparent advancements have come so da*n fast that cameras have been upgraded yearly while the system that supports the camera is still trying to catch up.
Of course Canon is murking up the waters by trying to put is stopgaps such as the new EFS lenses, running 3 different crops simultaniously and only recently getting their digital ETTL up to scratch.
In the meantime, the technology is still immature, having a top of the line pro body with only 4fps, no anti-dust, still no decent DR in the highlights, etc while running a 1.3x alternate pro body alongside, does not to me look like a technology that has matured and has both feet on the ground.
When the digi wars are over I think that we will all give a sigh of relief and look back at the compromises we made then, and the money we spent on not yet perfect tools because of what they promised.
What camera, with what lens, for what job, we will be using as we sigh, who knows. What I do know is that it will have come of age and be from a fully mature technology, we will trust in it as a tool, one which will last for years of service without complaint.
Of course the Apocolypse may have come by then.... :p
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The aircraft became the US Navy RA5C. The A3 designation was for the original aircraft and the North American planes. The Navy limited the speed to mach 2.0, but North American test pilots exceeded at least mach 2.5, likely more. The aircraft set speed and altitude records (at 91,451 feet in 1960) for planes its size and weight. It was no match for the SR71 though.
If the military had a 25Mpixel digital back 40ish years ago, how much better can/has digital get/gotten?
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My guess is, the shot employing only R pixels would be noticeably lower quality than the S pixel shot (standard mode)which had been exposed for the highlights.
Very interesting. What if the small pixel is just modifying the result (255) of the larger blown out pixel? Its raw data may not be used, but may merely recalculate the adjacent pixel result.
Its a 6 megapixel camera then. And not what I'm looking for. I can just use multiple frames with a higher mpxl camera !
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Obviously digital had driven me temporarily insane. When a 22MP back becomes reasonable (5 years? 10? ever?) I'll do some serious digital shooting again.
I sure wish I had lugged the Contax to Israel. At least then I'd have some 'real' shots for posterity.
As soon as I have the money I will spend up to $5k for a mint Plaubel Veriwide 100. Or maybe an Alpa. Screw digital.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone over the age of 16 make themselves as miserable about something that they didn't have the cash to purchase.
Why don't you get yourself a part time job and start saving? Most likely you could put aside enough in a couple of years to purchase a good used MF back.
In the meantime staying busy will help you keep your mind off your predicament.
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Canon has been able to pull it off and they now virtually stand alone. Nikon limps along by virtue of their history alone. Watch carefully the press pit at the games, political events and it is hard to find a single Nikon.
The press pit shows that Canon is dominant in one aspect of photography; making the fast, highly automated "ultimate point and shoot cameras" needed for journalistic and sports photography. And this domination started before digital, driven by things like lens technology.
I do not think however, that this shows that "resistence is futile" in all aspects of high quality photography. What works well in the press pit is rather irrelevant to those who operate in "frames per minute", if not "minutes per frame", such as most medium format users.
Exactly. And how short some memories are. Remember the Nikon D1? When that came out, in the Jurassic era (1999), you could have said "Nikon virtually stands alone".
Things change too fast in digital to justify conclusions, particulary when they are mainly based around a single camera.
Quentin
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There's a possibility that, as technology advances, large format, high pixel-count cameras will become affordable simply because it's affordable to produce them. Such cameras might be more than you need; almost certainly will be more than you need just as any modern computer that anyone can buy will likely have more facilities than anyone wants to use.
I see no problem with this. Anyone who is currently interested in nothing larger than 6x4" prints needs no more than a 2 megapixel camera which no manufacturer is now producing (except in cell phones and the like).
Technology marches on. Money has to be made. People have to upgrade. Salesmen and advertising agencies will continue to promote the superior product.
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"Any time you examine the issue of sharpness it must be seen in the context of magnification and viewing distance. Look at a billboard from across the street. See the pretty girl with silky long hair standing on a beach, enticing you to flee winter and join her in the Bahamas? Looks pretty sharp. Individual strands of hair are visible and you can almost count the grains of sand.
Now climb up on the scaffolding and look at the billboard from a distance of 24 inches. All that beautiful detail has been reduced to half-tone dots the size of golf balls. The image likely isn't even intelligible any longer — it's just big blobs of coloured dots.
This explains why medium and large format images appear "sharper" than prints made from 35mm — even though the 35mm lenses may have as much as twice the resolution. They simply don't need to be enlarged as much. To make an 8X10" print a 35mm frame needs to be enlarged about 8X. A 6X6 frame about 3X. As long as prints are small it doesn't make much difference. Beyond about an 8X10" print though even the best shot 35mm images start to lose quality, while a 6X6cm based image is usually fine up to about 16X20"."
Michael Reichmann
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Or maybe that is why so many 8x10 users seem to be fond of grand, distant subjects, for which getting adequate DOF is easier
Well, the only 8x10 shooter I know is Michael Fatali, and he does a lot of slot canyons and these are notoriously the most DOF challenging subjects, so I wonder how he manages. Having seen a lot of 4x5 and 8x10 gallery exhibits it's very hard to believe that those guys are so crippled by DOF and diffraction constraints.
In the case of MF, you don't even generally have the option of lens motions like LF, so does this mean then that medium format is less versatile for DOF than 35mm? Would you lose a lot of the benefit of the extra resolution with 22 Mpixel MF backs due to diffraction and DOF constraints? There's still something massively hard to understand about all this. How could Michael be so enthused about p25 if you're losing so much of the resolution benefit when you're not shooting easy DOF subjects at f11 or so? The biggest challenge for landscape photography is getting enough DOF most of the time, so what good is a p25 back?
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a) What do you meant "once sensor technology matures"? 1ds is already beyond most lenses and 1dsMKII is way beyond all but a mere handful of lenses, none of them the wide and ultrawide lenses I care about most.
Yeah, but as Jonathan explained, you don't get relatively more diffraction problems with larger formats, since it's absolute aperture diameter and not the f stop value that determine this.
c) If you additionally take into account your observation that larger lenses are relatively easier to make because absolute machining and grinding accuracy tolerances also get relaxed proportionately with absolute lens size, then it's win/win every which way for going to a larger format.
a) I mostly agree, but I was covering myself. Medium format certainly has room to increase sensor size a bit, even smaller photosites might be useful for completely removing sensor as a limitation on resolution, and it is not clear to me that the best Canon and Nikon primes cannot benefit from improved sensor resolution.
That is what I have also tried to explain, over and over again: same aperture diameter, same diffraction effects and DoF on prints of the same size.
c) How about win, win, lose: the larger format gear is still likely to be heavier and more expensive, and with a smaller range of lens choices, less sopisticated automation of focus exposure and such. But for sheer image quality in slow paced photography I agree, and I can imagine that the range of lenses good enough to get the most out of the sensors (good primes?) is comparable or better in 645. Michael certainly seems more enthusiastic about his Zeiss/Contax 645 lenses.
Yet another possible advantage for a larger format: computed lens resolution probably scales with format size and focal length at the same aperture ratio (balancing out like CoC etc. does), because you can just scale up all dimensions of the lens. But as I have been arguing, larger formats tend to use higher aperture ratios, which should give at least a little room for improvement in high speed, low DOF shots. This may be irrrelevant though in the f/16 to f/32 realm that we have been discussing!
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OK, I get it. There was just too much missing information (like that this had to do with wide angle performance) to make the correct connections. I thought maybe what was meant was that if I just "backed up" and retracted everthing I've posted in the past several months things would be all better. Actually I didn't know what was meant. Thanks for the clarification.
Well, as far as wide angle performance, I'm actually quite satisfied with my Zeiss lenses. There's a little falloff, a little CA, but these are extremely easy to totally fix in raw conversion. The virtual total unavailability of Zeiss distagon ultrawides anywhere in the world (including Japan) makes Zeiss lenses not a good ultrawide solution for most people. Testing a bunch of zooms for the occasional good one is also not feasible for a lot of people. Somebody needs to make some good ultrawide primes again.
As for all that stuff about DOF and diffraction in larger formats vs smaller, I kinda wish I COULD back my truck up a couple weeks in time and just undo my dipping an oar into those waters. I still don't get it. I'd flunk one of BJL's college courses for sure. In the absence of the sort of brain that's properly equipped for such matters, I'll keep my faith in the good engineering of bumble bees and that MF will give me much better results (including acceptable diffraction and DOF performance) than a very high density 35mm sensor and 35mm lenses. Consider it a "religious" issue not amenable to math or logic. Pom's picture and report of direct experience coupled with many people's decades of good results from medium format in general don't hurt either.
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Only time will tell about all these predictions and I can't imagine any reason to take any of this so seriously; a little break from image processing while it's too rainy, snowy, and cold to be out shooting.
Well, in this case it is too windy, 10bft, so I don't want to take my non-weather-sealed sub USD1000 digital rebel out anywhere. And perhaps I should take a break from sorting my personal finances, which just gives me too many a glance at some or other IRS reference, any of which is always entirely beyond comprehension. Come to think of it, perhaps i am operating in a different univers.
I was referring at the whole "irate argument" thing and your previous references to being called a madman. I don't really see how either is going to help development or give your statements more credibility. But, I admit, there have been no direct expressions of anger from your side, so I apologize for the misinterpretation.
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My understanding is that "the well" is a reservoir. It's charged over time to a given voltage by photons and discharged by the reading circuitry, either line by line or all at once, as an array. The stored value for each site is computed by how much power it takes to discharge the well back to zero.
I could also be full of cr@p. :p
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Use your histogram.
Expose to the left.
If you have the ability to greatly extend the camera's DR you won't blow out the highlights.
Don't you mean, expose to the right? I don't see this as a solution. This is just normal practice isn't it?
No. If you weren't afraid of blowing out your highlights you could adjust your exposure (within limits) to allow capture in the shadow areas.
If your camera was counting the number of times a highlight 'well' had filled you'd have both the dark and light data to create a very wide DR image. DR would only be limited by the ability of your presentation medium.
(I may not be correct about exposing to the left. It just sounded fun. )
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"Maybe the ability to make loupe-quality 3-foot-by-five-foot shots?"
To please whom? How many 36x60 prints do you make (or want even)? I think you may be on to something here. Why not shoot what you want and like? Some folks get so hung up on "my lens is better than yours."
The most technological camera/lens/tripod combo is nothing that money can't buy. But a really great image that you like can be done with a lot of cheaper cameras.
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If someone 5 years ago had told me that there would be any sort of market at all for an $8000 35mm camera I'd have figured they were crazy.
Really? Crazy which way - that you'd spend so much or spend so little?
The first "affordable" pro DSLR, the Nikon D1**, came out in June 1999 with 2.74 megapixels and a 1.5X crop at a price of US$5500. Five years later, for $2500 more you get a FF sensor and 16.7 megapixels that tax the resolving power of most 35mm lenses.
However, your sentiment is well-taken. Strictly as an amateur photographer, I never thought I'd own $10,000 worth of camera gear!
** Yes, a year later the Canon D30 came in at 3.3 megapixels for less than $3000. But who's telling this story?
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On the money front:
Last night I was remarking to my wife that I'm glad I wasn't starting photography when we got married as we managed to sensibly spend all our wedding money on furnishing a house, when I would have spent it on starting a business.
Then I thought for a second, then, when one started out as a wedding photographer, you would buy 2 2nd hand Canon AE-1's (I still miss the A1, the only body I ever fell in love with), 28/50/85mm lenses, a bunch of Vivitar 285 flashes (also 2nd hand if you wanted), two strobes with stands and brollies, a hand meter and a prayer.
That would cost you about oooh, $1500, maximum for enough photographic equipment to start a wedding business.
Now, let's see. A Canon 20D with a 2nd hand 10D for backup and the battery packs to balance the big lenses + 2 batteries each. 4-6 Gig of CF cards, 17-40L and a 70-200L at a minimum. 580ex flash plus backup 550ex. Two strobes with stands and brollies. High powered computer system for batch processing 4-500 RAW files to proofs, anyone want to price it out?
Of couse we save in film, but then didn't we charge the film costs to the client anyway? we sure arn't charging the computer time...
Don't get me wrong, I haven't shot a roll of film since I went digital, but it sure does have a hefty startup price these days compared to when I started out.
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"...the aircraft was a North American A3C..."
This is a bit OT, but I am curious as to what an A3C is...I spent a reasonable amount of time around military aircraft and this is the first time that I have come across this name. Also, the only aircraft that comes anywhere close to your original description is the Blackbird...no other aircraft has gone quite as fast or as high (other than the X-15). If you can provide more information I would be interested to follow up on the aircraft.
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... In any high DR situation, most of the light which would normally result in a blown highlight, is not being captured by the R pixels. It's falling everywhere else, much of it presumably overspill on the S pixels, and is essentially being wasted.
I do not see this as a problem. The small R pixels are meant to detect only a small fraction of the light available, so as not to fill their wells until several stops beyond the level where the S pixels are full.
The questions is, what proportion of the excess[/i] light, over and above what the S pixels can handle, do the R pixels capture?
If the R pixels are designed to have a 2 stop dynamic range, then adopting the expose to the right principle, we should be able to shoot the same scene in 'wide mode' using a shutter speed 4x slower, or an aperture 2 stops wider than we would use in standard mode exposing for the highlights. I don't see this happening in the test shots and I suspect the reason is those R pixels are just not high enough quality. The spacing between them is too great to produce a high quality image.
This is how I would test the quality of those R pixels. Select an appropriate white or pale target containing lots of fine texture such as the weave on a piece of fabric, or the slightly rough surface of grey concrete. Set the exposure on the S3 in standard mode so the entire target became a blown highlight, but only just. (It would probably be necessary to take a few shots in 1/3rd stop increments till one reached the point where only a small amount of detail was just barely visible.)
Switch the camera to wide mode and retake the shot with all other settings the same. The result would be an image that had employed only the the R pixels.
One could then reshoot the scene with camera in standard mode, but this time correctly exposing for the highlights in order to capture the texture of the fabric. How would the 2 photos compare?
My guess is, the shot employing only R pixels would be noticeably lower quality than the S pixel shot (standard mode)which had been exposed for the highlights.
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Hhmm! I should use my Fuji GSW690lll with fixed 65mm lens equivalent to 35mm format 28mm. The Fujinon f5.6 lens is very sharp. I should really use this camera more often but the thought of messing around with film, buying it, getting it developed, scanning it etc is simply offputting.
But I'm going to make a real effort next time I go out bush.
I took my 10D to Israel and shot the whole country over three weeks. I got some great images. I got the narcotic of digital coursing through my veins. I was a hopeless addict.
I came home and back to my normal shooting which is landscape of my neighborhood, The Hill Country of Texas. Like Van Gogh (I wish) I believe in shooting what I see in front of me ... here ... now. Of course the 10D was insufficient and I started to think about a 1Ds. Knowing it was near the end of it's product cycle I waited for the 1Ds II. In the meantime I forced myself to shoot with my Contax 645.
Guess what? The digital addiction lost it's grip. What was I thinking?! $8000.00 to go back to inferior lenses and substandard photography!!!???
Obviously digital had driven me temporarily insane. When a 22MP back becomes reasonable (5 years? 10? ever?) I'll do some serious digital shooting again.
I sure wish I had lugged the Contax to Israel. At least then I'd have some 'real' shots for posterity.
As soon as I have the money I will spend up to $5k for a mint Plaubel Veriwide 100. Or maybe an Alpa. Screw digital.
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Bob,
I did go out and start a second career in my retirement JUST to finance my photography. I spent 20k this year alone. I love shooting film. Gotta get my own scanner though. I wouldn't pay 30k for a DB if I had ten times my present capital because I'm not a pro and could never justify the expense.
I'm not miserable. I just think digital is obscenely overpriced.
Bet you don't have a sailboat, airplane, or play golf either. Some hobbies just cost a lot of money.
Pros have to justify their expenses. Amateurs have the advantage here.
As for 'obscenely overpriced'. You're talking about spending $5k for a used film camera. And how much for a scanner? Add in five or six years of film savings and you're not talking chicken feed.
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Remember the Nikon D1? When that came out, in the Jurassic era (1999), you could have said "Nikon virtually stands alone".
I do remember the Nikon D1. I was in the U.K at the time I decided to switch from Minolta to Canon because I figured Canon was the more innovative company, had that great image stabiliser system, 3 tilt & shift lenses and an affordable 100-400 IS zoom.
I used to joke about the fact that for a mere 5,000 pounds sterling, you could get a DSLR that could equal the quality of 8x10 prints from scanned 35mm film. Sure it was a milestone, but irrelevant to my needs. Even the Canon D30, better and cheaper than the D1, was too expensive for me.
Canon has clearly taken the lead, which is not to say, however, that Nikon will not catch up :D .
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Most also seem to believe that MF digital is a growing aspect of the Pro DSLR world. I just don't. The price is too outlandish and it won't last as a market segment. The day of small highly specialist oriented companies is past. Past long ago. The corporate culture demands monster profits and high volume. Artistic endeavours making modest profits are not tolerated. Keep in mind it is an oriental corporate behemoth we are all bowing to.
This is where you're off in la-la-land. Technology is improving at a fairly rapid rate. Keep in mind that less than 10 years ago, a 6MP DSLR cost as much as one of the MF backs you're whining about do today. 10 years from now a 30+MP MF back will probably be less than $4000, and 16+MP 35mm format DSLRS will probably less than $2000. And 4x5 50+MP digital backs will probably be less than $10000. Phase One has a back-order condition on their 22MP backs right now because busy pros can earn back their "outrageous" cost in a few months, and save on hefty film costs for the remaining life of the back, while simultaneously increasing their output quality. Or are you proposing that every photographer buying a MF back is a flaming idiot?
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I'm afraid I can't compete in this discussion as far as the math or physics goes, however I found that shots I had taken using a Mamiya 645 with a 210mm lens set at f32 were incredibly sharp and easily beat similar sized 35mm prints shot at f8 (same technique, great glass, blahdiblah and yes I had knocked it of f22 by mistake!).
I was very suprised at this, but to me it makes sense. At 18X12" 35mm runs out of steam, therefore this could be said to be a pretty large enlargement of the frame, which will show any faults and problems.
645 however handles a 16X12" print without even getting warmed up. It is not at the enlargement stage yet where faults will show, or at least make problems.
To my mind, although there may be the same diffraction at f32 on both medium format and 35mm, the diffraction will only show up as the same if you magnify the image the same amount. If you magnify a 35mm frame by X to get a print size where diffraction is noticeable and a problem, you have to magnify the med format print by the same X before you see the same diffraction. The med format print will of course be much larger.
35mm can only be enlarged so much before it gives up for multiple reasons, sharpness being only one of them. I can therefore enlarge a med format frame more than a 35mm frame, and still not have reached the X point where diffraction is a problem.
If I can enlage med format more than 35mm, even for digital, then med format is better for prints over a certain size despite having to stop further down. I'm sure this is even more apparent with 8X10"!
Of course the mathematicians may say I'm wrong, I'm just looking at the prints.
(http://www.bphotography.co.uk/pics/art/Tangled.jpg)
Mamiya 645 210mm f32, every single twig is razor sharp on a 16X12" print...
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Good lenses will probably be the greatest factor in image quality once sensor technology matures
What do you meant "once sensor technology matures"? 1ds is already beyond most lenses and 1dsMKII is way beyond all but a mere handful of lenses, none of them the wide and ultrawide lenses I care about most.
I think he's got it! This almost uniform increase of various relevant length scales in my main point.
Yeah, but as Jonathan explained, you don't get relatively more diffraction problems with larger formats, since it's absolute aperture diameter and not the f stop value that determine this. The smaller f stop value required for comparable DOF for a larger format is no problem because that larger f stop value is NOT a smaller diameter in absolute terms.
If you additionally take into account your observation that larger lenses are relatively easier to make because absolute machining and grinding accuracy tolerances also get relaxed proportionately with absolute lens size, then it's win/win every which way for going to a larger format. Moreover, 35mm format has been seriously compromised by consumerish gimmickry and convenience features that rule even in the rarified $8000 DSLR market. You can't buy an ultrawide prime for EOS and ultrawide zooms just don't quite hack it, with only rare individual sample exceptions, and then never for wide open apertures. For MF there's practically nothing made except pro quality prime lenses and they're not even expensive and there's lots of used ones around dirt cheap. Oh, boy, I can hardly wait, though you won't be seeing my 1ds stuff on ebay either. 1ds is great for now, but only for now.
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didger, because yo udon't own a TV, amybe you aren't aware, but:
For the best camera/lens/tripod/printer, there's MasterCard.
"... do free schlepping for the privilege of being in the presence of photographic fame." Priceless.
Gag me with a spoon. Please.
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Where is there any grounds for optimism that there will be lenses to adequately match 1dsMKIII sensors or 1.6x sensors of ever higher sensor site densities? It's all fantasies. The only way upward is medium format, and hopefully some day 4x5 digital.
Well I agree generally, except I think it's a fallacy to believe that current 1Ds and Mkll sensors are so good that they've left the lenses behind. There's no reason to blame the lens for inadequacy any more than the sensor. Improve either one of them, not necessarily in pixel count for the sensor but pixel quality, and you'll get sharper, better images.
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Peter, I like all your ideas and maybe most of them are even doable, but not for free. However, what are "legacy lenses" that would allow you to use 25 Mpixels effectively in 35mm format? I don't know of any lenses shorter than 35mm that can even keep up with 16 Mpixels or more than barely 11. What lenses are you talking about? If Zeiss distagon lenses are "legacy", I'm afraid you'll be disappointed in the ultrawide realm.
My belief is that post processing could yield big improvements with a marginal situation. I've seen it in audio and video, why not still photography.
DxO (or something like that) is just the beginning, I would assume. A film camera is somewhat of a binary device, either a grain of silver gets enough light or it doesn't. Its just that their are multiple layers of silver (maybe better to say depth than layers) in an emulsion. With a sensor, its just one layer.
Their can be a number of ways to gain info. Give me enough data points and I can easily guess whats between. The bayer filter(?) has to process like that. I believe there is much to be gained by "in camera" and "post processing. To me anyway there's a great deal of advances available in the area.
Processing could mitigate the whole lens/ sensor size conumdrum.
Question: How does the "well" work. Is it a counter or a reservoir?
Bob
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Howard -
You're an engineer, are you not? If you've got the background, what's your take on the ability for modern technology to produce better, and more consistently better lenses?
Why, for example, is not every element ground to the highest precision? Why is not each element precisely placed in the barrel? And adjusted as necessary?
We're moving single atoms around these days.
(Maybe the issue is cost of tooling. Or maybe I have too much faith in clever people....)
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And let's not forget that smaller lenses are easier to make. Are they not? My entire trip here is about making smaller high resolution cameras rather than pursuing the old path of 'Bigger is Better'.
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"Well, we know that lenses as good as a Zeiss can be made.
So given enough market demand one of the manufactures is going to revise their manufacturing process to crank out a flow of them."
Likely true. Reading forums like LL gives the impression the market demand is there. But LL readers represent a very very small fraction of the camera public. How any 1ds bodies does Canon sell per every sub-5mp camera? I have no idea, but my guess it isn't many, and Canon doesn't need 1ds sales to stay in business. I suspect the 1ds type cameras are a subsidy for and a platform for R&D.
"A third party battery (presumably just as good) cost $100. A bit of research on the net can locate a supplier of another third party brand costing just A$35. Hope my camera doesn't explode one day. If it does, I'll probably think, 'you get what you pay for' "
The world economy is not perfect. In a perfect economy, I could not sell an equivalent product for a higher price. There are people who will buy "Canon" (or whatever) at a higher price an an equivalent or maybe even better product. Then there are who will buy a more expensive Nikon product because it is in effect cheaper (I have all these Nikon lenses, so I can't a bettter Canon 1ds and all new lenses. I'll settle for a lesser Nikon body.). Even Canon competes with Canon by selling different versions of the same product. How many similar zoom lenses does Canon make?
A megamegapixel 4x5 back will likely be severly limited by today's or tomorrow's LF lenses. The resolution of any lens/sensor combination will never be as good as the weaker link. A perfect back would no better than a really great one, yet cost much more.
And in the final analysis, it is the print that matters. That makes printers a limiting factor. Then there is the human. I don't expect any great advances in human eye sight soon. In fact, I think it will decline, IMUO.
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I just had a recollection. About 40 years ago I saw a photo of two men plying golf. I sould easily see the golf ball on the green. It helped to tell it was a golf ball to see the green and two golfers. I could see the dimples or the name on the ball though. The most amazing thing to me was the photo was taken with a MF camera on an airplane 65,000 feet above the golf course and traveling at 1200 mph. That was 40 years ago and film. How good can digital get?
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I used to give the negs anyway, it was my selling point. What I meant was that the price included film + processing, it wasn't invoiced seperately.
I don't charge less when shooting digital, the money comes to me not the lab that's all, still, if you worked it out in $ per hr it's not a huge amount for your computer time.
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I don't want to sound disagreeable
No problem. I always try to look at the strength of the argument. I can only speak of what makes sense to me.
If we were to devise a test chart for the R pixels alone, it might consist of dots of shades of 'white' (actually pale grey), all of which would be of greater intensity than the S pixels could handle.
If we were then to remove all the S pixels from the sensor, because they wouldn't be serving any purpose, and record a scene containing, say a hundred different shades of white, many of those shades of white would fall in the rather large spaces between the very small R detectors with their small microlenses.
The small R detector is serving some purpose. It wiil pick up a proportion of those dots (which could be described as representing the texture of sunlit concrete), but will ignore the dots that fall in between.
According to Fuji's schematic diagram of those pixels, shown in Michael's review, the distance between the R pixels is much greater than the diameter of the S pixels. I would therefore deduce that most of the excess photons constituting blown highlights will fall on stony ground, ie. serve no purpose.
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hehe, I know your right. Most of my digital capture for work does not require any more than a lower/mid range dslr. 6 megapixels are more than enough. I just have a project later this year thats going to require more. The d2x will get me there. I hope anyway. If not, I shoot film,
I sense Fuji is on the right path
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However, what i am saying is that we have made this mistake before with computers. 10 years ago, no one would image we need a 1ghz processor, now, people are talking about dual 2.5ghz.
But there's a basic difference between cameras and computers.
My early desktops - Apple II types - that ran at a blazing speed of 6 mHz were plenty for word processing and spreadsheet work. I'm a fast typer but I couldn't type fast enough to overload the buffer.
But new uses for computers developed. Graphics and games required a lot more speed. Over time these got more sophisticated and required even more speed. Computer manufacturers have been pushing to keep up with these demands.
Cameras take pictures. Most people have a maximum print size that they very rarely wish to exceed. We're reaching the point at which each of us can find a camera that meets our printing needs.
It's unlikely that there are going to be new uses for cameras that will cause them to drastically change in the way computers have. (Sure, there will be needs for better video, better camera phones, but those are different tools.)
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Jo,
Thanks. I just emailed Mr. Fuerbringer. We'll see what happenes. I found this site on Plaubels:
http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/veriwide.html (http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/veriwide.html)
Know any other good ones?
Yes I could see just from my limited study that tha later f/5.6 47mm SA would be preferable. So the camera was never originally made with this lens? As to your Horseman back? What is the advantage to this? 220 over 120?
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Come on Quentinn and BJL...
Are we honestly discussing present day reality .... or just tryin to win arguements?
It's not just the press pit and both of you know it. It's fashion and product and fine art and wedding and and and and and .....
The GD 1Ds II is so much better than ANYTHING outside of the 400% more expensive and clumsy by comparison DBs that as I said ....
It virtually stands alone.
This is a problem and it is half the curx of what I'm always whining about. It's gonna ruin much if not most of this game. Can you imagine if there was only one brand of car? Home appliances? Clothes? etc.
Can you imagine how much more of a dick Bill Gates would be if there was no Unix and Apple?
Thank goodness they are charging such rapine prices for the 1Ds and the MF DBs. If forces thousands like me to shoot MF and LF film. Thus the 'end of the world as we know it' is postponed.
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Some little upstart like Foveon could make a breakthrough but they will be bought out or forced to keep the prices high.
Foveon is manufactured under contact by National Semiconductor. Hardly a little upstart, that National Semiconductor.
So what? The big boys have already got the whole Pro world anxious to pony up $8k for a lousy camera body. The 'cream of the crop' are willing to cough up $30k for a back.
They will back off these figures exactly as far as they are FORCED.
I don't see any army on the horizon.
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If you magnify a 35mm frame by X to get a print size where diffraction is noticeable and a problem, you have to magnify the med format print by the same X before you see the same diffraction. The med format print will of course be much larger.
This is the "common sense" assumption I was making all along as well, but with no personal MF experience. However, all this math stuff (in which I'm also not knowledgeable) apparently insists on just the opposite; namely that you'll see diffraction and DOF limit blurriness at the same print size in both systems. You would presumably only see the superior sharpness of MF at optimal apertures (NOT f32) and then only in a very small area of perfect focus. I'm inclined to go with your print rather than the math and I'm still not discouraged about a 22Mpixel MF DSLR in my future in the next year or so.
I like the tunnel through the trees shot; it looks like a study in organic fractal geometry. I don't understand fractal math either, however, though I may hold the world's record for number of fractal images generated as animation frames. Thank God that you need neither advanced math nor any rules of composition to do personally satisfying and commercially viable photography, music, and art.
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Everything increases proportionately as image size and lens size gets bigger.
I think he's got it! This almost uniform increase of various relevant length scales is my main point.
Except that the length scales which lenses can resolve probably do not scale up quite so fast, giving a larger format at least a bit of an edge. Good lenses will probably be the greatest factor in image quality once sensor technology matures, and bigger has an edge, since manufacturing tolerances do not have to be quite so tight.
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Well, considering the incredible complexities involved in choosing and using these tools competently, I feel truly fortunate that I ended up with a kit that's working as well as it is. I don't see anything whatsoever available in the world today at anything like a price I can afford that I'd rather have, and that even includes my Apple Cinema monitor. I never calibrated it, taking the word of a pro photograper friend that said they're good enough straight out of the box. Well, just a few minutes ago Jonathan's 24x36 print that he made for me arrived and it's incredibly close to what the monitor shows and also incredibly sharp. The sharpness and absolute absence of any artifacts from pretty massive processing really amazed me. Of course, I had to do a lot of cleanup before I sent the file to Jonathan, but the whole procedure from shooting through printing really worked. If 22 Mpixel MF turns out to be twice as good as 1ds, maybe I'll never need to think of going beyond that in my quest to rival David Muench 4x5 prints for technical quality.
Now if I could just train a swarm of bumblebees to carry some of my stuff for me; or get famous so that college students will do free schlepping for the privilege of being in the presence of photographic fame.
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However, because photonic noise is equal to the square root of the signal, we can arrange for it to be less significant by making bigger pixels that receive larger signals, which is the general idea of large format.
Consider a really big pixel on a large format sensor that can absorb, say 1 million photons. Photonic noise will be 1,000 photons or 0.1% of the total signal.
Consider a really small pixel that can absorb only 1000 photons to maximum well capacity. Square root of a thousand is 32. Photonic noise is 3.2% of the signal. A big difference.
Are you saying that large photosites can generate a stronger signal because their greater surface area will be struck by more photons than a small photo site?
Or are you saying that large photosites simply have more 'capacity'?
(Or some combination of the above?)
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I haven't followed the DxO stuff to any extent. But isn't it based on the concept that the data can be tweaked to make adjustments for lens problems?
OK, put each lens on a good test bench, fully automated. Analyze the lens. Store that correction data in a chip embedded in the lens.
Teach the camera to either use that data when building the file or to attach the data to each file for in-computer use.
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Bob, I am (was? retired now) an engineer. My experience with manufacturing was not with lenses. However, for many mass produced items, the items are made and a sample of product is examined, tested, whatever. It the sample is OK, then there are statistical reasons to believe that some percentage of the batch have some percentage of "acceptable traits." Say, 95% confidnet that 95% of the batch is within spec. The specs can be raised or the sample size increased to get more items in the batch acceptable.
The usual mathod of control is to monitor the line of products and change something that is drifting before there is a problem. Control charts based on the max, mean, min and standard deviations of the sampled items.
Some process accept (or reject) the whole batch. This is costly and is usually done when the rejects can be recycled rather than just dumped.
Some processes, small and expensive production runs, sample each item. Rare in mass production.
Variations in lenses would be caused by a large number of variable, like machine wear, variations in glass, variations in caotings, etc. How the elements are assembled is a big one. To be perfect, the center of each perfect element would have to line up with the center of the others, and the axis of each woulf have to be lined up. Hard to do. The better job, usually the more expensive the process, and a higher reject rate.
Look at MTFs for lenses. At the center, the radial and sagittal lines should meet. They usually don't though. That difference is most likely due to misalignment of elements. (Canon's match, but that is because the publish the "theroretical" lines, not actual. In theory, they are all great.)
Some process do actually "cherry pick" for you. When things are going good, tehy make their brand. As the process drifts, they make "non-house" brands. Or a rejected batch may become Chuck's 28mm/2.8 lens with a really low price.
The bottom line is, the is no free lunch. If you want to walk into your camera shop and grab any box off the shelf and get a great lens, it will likely cost you. Yes, there are great Sigma lenses and a few dog Zeiss lens samples. But they are rare.
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OK, I'll play....
(I've been snowbound for two weeks now. I'm getting a bit 'cabin fever crazy'.... ;o)
1) Much technology from the past will be carried forward.
-35mm form factor -
Yes and no. There's no reason for 'standard sizes'. We aren't all buying boxes of film any more. We buy our film once per camera.
I'm guessing that cameras will shake out in terms of print size.
35 mm will stick around for a long time because of the vast number of lenses floating around.
Ten years from now there will be more half-frame lenses in common use than full-framers.
And cameras (sensor sizes) will continue to shrink while maintaining performance for some time to come. Those 35 mm sized bodies/sensors will be the MF cameras of today.
-optical viewfinder
Most likely it's already about the last twig on that evolutionary branch. It might extend a bit further with the addition of a 'heads up' display of live histograms, etc. But I'll bet that within five years EVFs will be acceptable alternatives.
-35mm lens technology
Improvements are due here. Tighter sensor packing will require it. Ceramic lenses are going to make some lenses smaller and lighter. In addition ceramic is reported to have less CA problems.
-metering technology
-auto focus
No idea on these two. Except to say that most everything improves over time.
-anti shake/stabilization
Manufacturers are going to feel a lot of pressure to include this in their bodies. Especially if Oly puts it in their dSLRs.
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1200mph? were you in a jet fighter?
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DiaAzul, actually the aircraft was a North American A3C. No idea about the camera. I could not see the dimples or name on the golf ball, and had it been out in a corn field, it may not haveen identifiable as a golf ball. It only look like a golf ball because of the proximity to the golfers and on a green.
pom, "Of couse we save in film, but then didn't we charge the film costs to the client anyway?" I have been told by some who likely know that if you charge for film and processing directly and explicitly (instead of just burying those costs in a bigger "services" bill), the film with the images on it actually belongs to the client. They bought the film and services seperately.
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Ray,
have you seen tests using best practice conversion of RAW output from the S3? I cannot see any way that the sensor can be indicted as a failure without doing that; the adverse observations on JPEGs could simply reflect limitations of the in-camera JPEG conversion, which in turn could reflect the impossibility of having a "one size fits all" JPEG conversion strategy for high contrast scenes: this probably needs to be done by hand in RAW conversions.
Bob,
surely you recognize that many high contrast scenes must be taken in a single shot, not by taking two shots and blending. I also suggest that you not judge teh rsluto of a camera by numerological debates about how pixels are to be counted, but instead do it by looking at the results. the S2 already seemed to have noticably higher resolution than other 6MP DSLRs. Using data from 12 million different locations, even if half the measurements are of lower quality than the others, does potentially give more resolution than data from 6 million photosites alone, though not twice as much.
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I don't want to sound disagreeable but, I don't get what your saying. The small sensor compared to a photon is the grand canyon to a grain of sand.
Actually, the sensor sites on P&S cameras are getting pretty close to the smallest possible physical size--the wavelength of visible light. Red light has a wavelength of about .7 microns (~700 nanometers) and IIRC the 8MP sensor used on the Canon Pro 1 and Sony 828 has ~2 micron sensor sites. So it's possible for photosite size to be cut in half again, but that's pretty much as far as photosite shrinkage can go.
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Actually I'd say if one has the money now is the time to get the 1Ds Mk II as it may very well be all downhill from here.
Pro DSLR Digital tech is akin to rocket science and brain surgery combined. Canon has been able to pull it off and they now virtually stand alone. Nikon limps along by virtue of their history alone. Watch carefully the press pit at the games, political events and it is hard to find a single Nikon.
(completely beside the point but revelatory: Why hasn't canon made a good extreme WA lens for the 1Ds II? They could get away with a 3k price tag and most would pay it if there was any way they could scrape up the money. So why? Because they don't have to. Why bother? They got you where they want you ... why go out of their way?)
Kodak who started the digital revolution has fallen flat on it's face for two years now and is pulling ever back from the 'finished product' end of things and concentrating on making chips only. Don't talk to me about toy cameras. I'm talking about Pro DSLRs.
If Mamiya hits a home run with their ZD it will be a milestone ... a pivotal event ... because perhaps it will make someone else believe that Canon can indeed be challenged. But think of all the things that MUST come together. They have to match or exceed Canon on all the points. From resolution to iso to build quality. A bigger chip alone will not do it.
I'm afraid that Canon stands alone and if this is indeed borne out then quality will go only one way. Down.
Perhaps something will come out of all the mergers. I wish Nikon would merge with a company with some vision and daring. As it is now they look like a company ready to fold. Well not a whole company ... just their Pro DSLR division.
I think the true problem is the corporate culture itself. There just isn't a ton of money to be made here and corporate cheiftans look at the DSLR division compared to say, in Nikon's case, the eyeglasses and lens division, and ask themselves, "Why the do we bother with this crap"? Hellsbells the binocular division probably makes more money!
Why would any cut-throat capitalist continue to mess with costly (in EVERY way) high high tech endeavors that don't make much money when they can turn an easy buck in a hundred different ways?
There's really only room for one company and Canon is it. So buy your Canon now it's all you're ever gonna get.
"__ you!," you say "I'll take my 22mp digital back, thank you very much!" OK. You and about 1000 others on the entire planet. The rest of us have to live in the real world and most likely face divorce even to get the $8000 Canon. As to the price of 22mp backs coming below $15k and probably more like below $20k in '05 I say ... HA! Dream on.
Digital capture is a lost world to me and I don't even know why I bother any more.
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Canon has been able to pull it off and they now virtually stand alone. Nikon limps along by virtue of their history alone. Watch carefully the press pit at the games, political events and it is hard to find a single Nikon.
The press pit shows that Canon is dominant in one aspect of photography; making the fast, highly automated "ultimate point and shoot cameras" needed for journalistic and sports photography. And this domination started before digital, driven by things like lens technology.
I do not think however, that this shows that "resistence is futile" in all aspects of high quality photography. What works well in the press pit is rather irrelevant to those who operate in "frames per minute", if not "minutes per frame", such as most medium format users.
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Kevin, can I ask whether your marketing studies show that digital cameras/backs, will reach a plateu as to what is necessary, each format for it's own. For example will manufacturers try to take on 4X5 with DSLR's and will med format backs try to better 8X10 large format, or will the needs of the clients dictate how good the chips need to be so that at some point the manufacturers will say, 'Good enough, better for this format isn't needed by all but a tiny amount of our clients' and at that point when the digital race is over, the prices will stabilise and drop, and we will see new bodies/backs every 5-10 years.
Will the race not be won at some point in the next 10 years, and then having reached a plateu, stop, or at least slow down drastically? Will you continue to invest time and money in developing a med format back which will better 8X10, market it as a solution for all med format shooters and then in 5 years time sell it at the price the p25 is now, only to find out that a huge amount of your clients will say, 'I don't need anything better than the p25 or whatever, I won't need to upgrade again'. at that point the market falls away drastically and the price of 30,000 dollars is no longer justifiable for extra performance that is no longer necessary?
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Perhaps the evil effects of diffraction are being over-estimated here. Diffraction is a significant factor in sharpness from about f/22 in 35mm format, but it is far from being the sole determining factor until far smaller apertures: "pin-hole" territory. The resolving power of lenses and emulsions also play a significant role at apertures like f/22 or f/32, so it is not at all surprising to me that MF can give sharper images than 35mm at the same print size, or equal sharpness in larger print sizes even when the MF is used about one stop smaller to get the same DOF.
Good 35mm lenses often have optimal sharpness at about f/11 or even below, with some measurable degree of diffraction limitation beyond that, but this does not stop knowlegable photographers from using f/22 and beyond when appropriate for the sake of extreme DOF, and stil getting some impressivly sharp images.
The 9 micron pixel pitch of current 22MP backs seems to start feeling modest diffraction limitation at somewhere around f/16 to f/22 and should not be "diffraction crippled" at all even at f/32; these numbers give DOF comparable to f/11, f/16 and f/22 in 35mm format, which does not sound like a painful DOF restriction at all, especially with normal to wide FOV and/or distant subjects.
P. S. From my small experience, it seems to be that 8x10 is mostly used at normal to wide FOV, meaning with focal lengths mostly 300mm or less. Ansel Adams seemed to use a 10" (250mm) lens more than any other. This greatly helps in getting adequate DOF.
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Don't underestimate Chapter 11.
"Since I've talked to Fatali and David Muench AND Bev Doolittle I'm almost famous already just by association." I've never seen a photo of all three of you at once. Are you really Bev Doolittle?
Gosh, I shook the hand that shook the hand of Bill Clinton. I'm almost famous and didn't even know it. My sister had dinner with Richard Nixon, but I'm not a crook. I had a date with FDR's granddaughter. And, IMUO, Fatali is a jerk. So there.
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Are you saying that large photosites can generate a stronger signal because their greater surface area will be struck by more photons than a small photo site? Or are you saying that large photosites simply have more 'capacity'?
Hopefully someone here is an engineer that can really answer this in the detail you want. Basically, whether it's camera sensors or computer chips, the smaller the components, the more likelihood of errors due to random events that can't be eliminated and only mitigated with ever more challenging measures the smaller the components become. Eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns and an unacceptable gains vs cost ratio and then finally an absolute wall for a given type of technology. Altogether new kinds of technology are not predictable. These random events are of a low order of magnitude and get absorbed with no effect in a larger component, but may trigger a false signal output in a smaller component. Consider it like the difference between putting a gram of arsenic in a quart of water or a big storage tank full of water. The one situation will kill you with a sip and the other won't hurt you if you drink a quart.
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Let's say the camera takes 3-6 quick exposures to get the 'blend' shots.
Isn't this the problem? No quick exposure can capture detail in the shadows. If you want to blend images, you need one long exposure, one medium exposure and one quick exposure. Total time is one very long exposure.
Yes, this may be the downfall of that approach. But let me try one other idea.
Shadow areas don't throw off a lot of photons. The problem becomes separating the signal derived from those few photons from the inherent system noise.
If you had multiple frames to compare it might be possible to do a pixel by pixel analysis to determine which were the 'real' signals by their appearance across multiple frames.
(And, yes, this is all going to take a lot of processing power. But it doesn't need to be done in-camera. The camera can create a quick Jpeg for review.)
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Given the proper processing workflow, would discerning print buyers, at normal viewing distance, perceive any significant difference between a 16x20 print of a Digital Rebel image and 16x20 print of a high-end digital camera image? If so, where would the difference lie?
I think it's clear the differences would lie in the amount of fine detail and texture that would be visible close up. However, I suspect these differences would not be discernible from a viewing distance appropriate for taking in and appreciating the whole scene.
I can't comment on how this would affect sales except to say, if I was offered a choice of two 16x20 prints of the same scene, but one was sharp close up, as though it had been taken by a 1Dsll, and the other was slightly blurred close up but identical in all other respects, I'd choose the sharp one, if the price was right.
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I understand that no less a name than Leica has cooperated with Sigma (yes Sigma) and that some Leica lenses have exactly the same lens specs on paper as their Sigma counterparts. Can't verify if this is right, but it comes from a reliable source. The difference is that Leica operate stricter quality control and probably manufacture to closer tolerances.
So if the market (and profit) is there, Sigma could produce a super-EX range to the same exacting standards as Leica or Zeiss. In fact even if the story is baloney, it still stands to reason that the likes of Sigma Tamron, and Canon Nikon etc are in the business for profit and could do it anyway. But is the market for premium lenses big enough to justfy the hassle and expense?
And on this Canon v Medium format thing, in the days before digital, Canon did not compete with medium format, but still did perfectly well, so I don't see why they should be at all concerned if Medium format re-establishes its supremacy in the digital future. The bigger threat to Canon, and Nikon, may instead come from "new" formats that are "good enough" for photojournalism, sport and consumer use - possibly 4/3, or maybe something completely different, leaving 35mm size sensors caught between two stools.
Quentin
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Since the added photosites are only used to measure bright light and only need to cover a range of a few stops, they can be far smaller than the regular photosites. With Fuji's roughly octagonal photosites, the small highlight photosites seem to fit almost entirely into gaps that were there between the bigger photosites anyway.
The first implementation of the SR concept had both detectors under the one microlens. It can be clearly seen in the old and new diagrams of the photosite arrangement that the size of the S sensor was severely compromised. The old diagram shows it as being about half the size it could be, if the small R sensor wasn't there. I always believed this was a serious flaw in Fuji's concept.
They've addressed this issue in the new design by squeezing the R pixel, now with its own microlens, in between the main pixels. But why is there still not a major improvement in DR?
People are always talking about pixels getting so small they are beyond the resolving capabilities of the lenses used. I would say that the R pixel in Fuji's system is such a pixel. It's smaller than the resolving capabilities of the Nikon lenses and is therefore of limited usefulness.
In other words, the distances between the tiny R pixels are relatively huge and these spaces are very much withing the resolving capabilities of the lenses. In any high DR situation, most of the light which would normally result in a blown highlight, is not being captured by the R pixels. It's falling everywhere else, much of it presumably overspill on the S pixels, and is essentially being wasted.
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FOr an interesting DR improvement concept, look at this thread (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/cgi-bin/forum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=4;t=902;st=0;&#entry1).
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Most web photo forums have frequent discussions of whether to buy now or wait for better equipment, lower prices, etc. We then get the usual inane "buy now and prepare top spend big bucks to upgrade because that's the way the world is gonna work" or "relax and enjoy what you've got, it's good enough, and besides, a really good photographer can take great photos with 1mp Kodaks and a stick like Ansel Adams did."
But there are reasons (I have a couple, think of your own) for owning really good equipment right now; and also reasons for waiting, if the wait is short (less than a year.) So here's the question: Are the top line affordable cameras -- say the Canon 1DsMII -- good enough in producing 13x19 prints, that it's going to be a long time before newer cameras can produce better 13x19 prints? I don't want a discussion of technique, etc., so let's just say, prints of a photographic target under a variety of lighting conditions. Will there be massive improvements in dynamic range, or color quality, or light sensitivity, or noise control? Or are we now talking about small incremental changes? I read Reichmann's piece comparing the 1DsMII to the P25, and I wonder, if you are working with an Epson 4000, are you going to see a practical difference at 13x19? Will you ever? I understand that if you built a billion megapixal chip you could make a billboard that would be sharp under a loupe, but what will people finally settle upon as a practical optimum, where the critical factors become lens quality and ergonomics rather than bigger chips? Are we there now? Will be there soon?
I want to buy a camera now that I can work with, and settle on, for a long time, without giving up much in the way of print quality. Like everybody else, I think about price, but that's not as critical as the other considerations. I own a ton of Nikon equipment, but I'm getting very tired of waiting for Nikon to produce a camera that will match other camera's finest 13x19s. Right now I'm working with 2 Kodaks, and the good photos are fine, but the cameras have limits, especially in low light, and frankly, the ergonomics drive me crazy. I'm willing to make the switch to Canon, but I'd be less willing if I were convinced that the 1DsMII is just another one-year temporary waypost on the way to a real camera.
JC
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I'm surprised that in this discussion and other similar ones the Mimiya ZD never gets mentioned. This is a camera that weighs a little LESS than 1ds/1ds2 and inexpensive relatively light world class lenses are available, often used. The price could come in at not too much above 1dsMKII and you have 22Mpixel medium format (exactly double the 1ds/1ds2 sensor size). If Mamiya's fabulous quality record holds for this camera, it will blow away everything else there is. 1dsMKII? What's that? Why go Corvette if maybe the Ferrari is financially in reach?
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No, I'm not talking about chicken feed. I'm not averse to spending money. I rather enjoy it actually. ;]
I'm just standing for the position that these huge expenditures for cameras that are outdated every two years is not logical unless you are in a business that is paying for them within their obsolescence period.
I don't think this position gets aired all that much on photography websites and it should.
Digital is not 'HERE' yet for fine art shooting. It is not sensical. All we ever hear however is the 'sold-out-to-digital' viewpoint.
There are lots of guys selling lots of prints and not many of them are doing it with digital capture. It's too bad we can't get the numbers but I think they are something like 8 to 1. It's just that the 1 bunch is the web bunch for the most part.
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Kevin, can I ask whether your marketing studies show that digital cameras/backs, will reach a plateu as to what is necessary, each format for it's own. For example will manufacturers try to take on 4X5 with DSLR's and will med format backs try to better 8X10 large format, or will the needs of the clients dictate how good the chips need to be so that at some point the manufacturers will say, 'Good enough, better for this format isn't needed by all but a tiny amount of our clients' and at that point when the digital race is over, the prices will stabilise and drop, and we will see new bodies/backs every 5-10 years.
Will the race not be won at some point in the next 10 years, and then having reached a plateu, stop, or at least slow down drastically? Will you continue to invest time and money in developing a med format back which will better than 8X10, market it as a solution for all med format shooters and then in 5 years time sell it at the price the p25 is now, only to find out that a huge amount of your clients will say, 'I don't need anything better than the p25 or whatever, I won't need to upgrade again'. At that point the market falls away drastically and the price of 30,000 dollars is no longer justifiable for extra performance that is no longer necessary?
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Diffraction is a significant factor in sharpness from about f/22 in 35mm format
Well, what my extensive web search efforts came up with was also that for a 50mm lens diffraction typically becomes barely noticeable at f16 and significant at f22. HOWEVER, these considerations are for 35mm film. At f16 with the world class 50mm Canon compact macro lens diffraction is such a big issue that a 1dsMKII essentially loses all advantage over a 1ds according to crops I saw with my own eyes.
In any case, I'll keep believing that medium format and bumble bees will continue to fly just fine, even if math and theory considerations may not support the notion clearly. In any case about 90% of my shooting is wide angle and for that DOF is the most generous. Medium format support for really good wide angle lenses (primes) is far better than 35mm. It is a sad fact that at the moment there's NO very good 35mm ultrawide angle lenses being manufactured, except perhaps Leica. You can maybe be lucky and find a Zeiss distagon or maybe cherry pick a decent 16-35 L, but even that rare good Canon ultrawide zoom will still not be so good wide open, like a good prime.
I expect that a 22MP MF DSLR will be the exact same sort of quantum leap up form 1ds as 1ds was from 35mm film. If I live and stay active long enough I expect 4x5 digital that will allow backpackable 4x5 digital format. David Muench, here I come. :D
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For the best camera/lens/tripod/printer, there's MasterCard.
For the time being I've got exactly what I want. I DON'T want a 1dsMKII. I'll wait and see what the ZD is like.
Even not owning a TV, I've heard of credit cards, but I've also heard you have to eventually pay off what you charge. I guess I could use my Visa to pay off the Master card and then apply for a Discover to pay off Visa and then...
"... do free schlepping for the privilege of being in the presence of photographic fame." Priceless. Gag me with a spoon. Please.
Hey, come on, it works for Michael Fatali, and he's not even all that famous. I spent some time in the field with him and one of his adoring schleppers. Since I've talked to Fatali and David Muench AND Bev Doolittle I'm almost famous already just by association. I shook hands with Art Linkletter once too and my mother worked for Marlon Brando once, so there.
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Sfleming, I hadn't heard that story about Fatali, so my opinion that he is a jerk is not based on that episode. The duraflame log story may be a case where one's creativity outruns their common sense.
didger, even I don't remember when I met Fatali and formed this opinion, but it was in his studio in Page in 199x. Maybe that will jog his memory, but I really seriously doubt it. My wife was there too. We walked out and she said, "What a jerk." I agreed. I have only met the man that one time, so I have no other data. But he has made some fine images.
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There are obviously potential ways that sensors could be improved dramatically in various ways, including (maybe) substantially greater sensor site density. However, this would clearly be hugely expensive at least in terms of R&D and perhaps also manufacturing and quality control. Why would anyone bother to do all that if our present day fancy automatic everything lenses are still largely not up to the optical performance level of pre-computer German lenses? Are there any technologies that are not dream-world sci-fi (opgr) that might improve lenses so that it makes sense to keep improving sensors so much? What's happening in real life with lenses is not encouraging.
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I don't want to sound disagreeable but, I don't get what your saying. The small sensor compared to a photon is the grand canyon to a grain of sand. All sensors do is gather light and count or quantify it. The reassembly of the data, its quantity and by inference its color, is what makes a picture. The smearing of resolution which hits multiple sensors when one is enough ( or 2 or 3) is what resolution effects.
I understand each sensor point gathers data, so does the Fuji software recalculate each as a data point of the small sensors having the "gain" turned up, not electronically (ie ISO) but in software calculation. It would mean the small sensor would have additional capacity when the larger sensor is at its maximum. Seems like a doable technology and one that would expand the shoulder.
Film, to me, was an more stable world. I had great cameras that I owned for years and the price of new technology was buying a different box maybe with a different colored packaging.
Two overlapping and intertwined grids of different sensitivity is the closest we'll get to film with its varing grain size within the same emulsion.
I'm trying to figure out if the F3 is an overexpensive mid-range digital camera or the lowest cost uber camera out there.
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If the military had a 25Mpixel digital back 40ish years ago, how much better can/has digital get/gotten?
The biggest I have heard of is a bit more than 50MP, in a very large sensor from Fairchild I think; whether for purely military or also non-classified satellite imagery I do not know.
(Okay, okay, posting three months afterwards is a bit late, but catching up with everything in this forum takes time...)
The highest-resolution imager I'm aware of is in the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, and this is state-of-the-art as of January, 2003. It's the
MegaPrime/MegaCam (http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/Instruments/Imaging/MegaPrime/)
The wide-field imager, MegaCam (built by CEA, France), consists of 40 2048 x 4612 pixel CCDs (a total of 340 megapixels), covering a full 1 degree x 1 degree field-of-view with a resolution of 0.187 arcsecond per pixel to properly sample the 0.7 arcsecond median seeing offered by the CFHT at Mauna Kea.
But don't expect to be able to fit it onto a portable camera system like a view camera. :)
BTW, I sincerely doubt the claims of extreme resolution found in legendary military hardware and optics. And no, there have been no official admissions that "satellites can read license plates" (except in Hollywood movies, which we should know do their best not to portray reality), although they did admit to being able to distinguish three grapefruits placed next to eachother, against a darker background (2001/2002, IIRC). A pretty thorough debunking (http://www.c4i.org/spysats.html) from 2000 is still valid.
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When you buy a 20mm Canon lens, you will very very likey get a 20mm Canon lens. You get exactly what you paid for. The lens was offered at a price, and you accept. No fraud.
Well of course, that's true in a literal sense. But I understood the term, 'you get what you pay for' to mean the quality of an item is always proportional to its price. The expression is often used to explain away disatisfaction with a cheap product.
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I don't see why Canon needs to be overly concerned about MF and beyond. I sure don't see a Canon ZD coming. If Canon wanted to be a MF format giant, they would be. That whole market is insignificant compared to consumer cameras. Not the Canon is concerned only with consumer cameras. The pro market keeps them at the front, and helps the consumer market with the "I use use a Canon just like Art Wolfe" crowd. And not that Canon cares all that much directly perhaps, it fuels the "my Canon is bigger than your Nikon" fire.
Nikon has a presence in LF with a line of view camera lenses. Again, I doubt that efforts adds (or reduces) their bottom line much. Otherwise, their presence would likely change up or out.
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So you're not happy (or would not be happy) with a Nikon D2X @ 13x19?
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That's why I mentioned the idea of a used 1Ds. 13x19 prints are simply superb, and the cost is about half of a 1Ds-MkII. It's not as suitable for fast action, but for most everything else it's still excellent if not the state of the art.
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Couldn't agree more.
As someone who is very involved in this marketplace not to mention 35 years in this industry I am amazed by the lack of vision of some. This is a very exciting time to be in photography. Photographers are embracing technology and creating photographs like they never have before. The marketplace is moving to digital and adopting it from the consumer all the way to the pro. There are cameras out there for everyone and prices that anyone can afford.
This year companies like Phase One, Leaf, Imacon and others have seen record sales as medium format has enjoyed resurgence. Pros and non-pros have embraced the format again. Mainly because the systems are now truly portable. There is no question that the quality of the image is exceptional. And, photographers are doing work and images with the medium format backs that they haven't been able to do before. On location fashion, architecture, landscape and so much more. At Phase One we have seen a large number of non-professional photographers adopt this system. These are people with a passion for the image and want nothing but the best.
Medium format systems and even present DSLR system will keep their price points. Years ago Phase One introduced the LightPhase 6 mega pixel back that went on to set the industry on fire. Thousands of these backs were sold to photographers who wanted the best image quality and technology that were available. These folks were early adapters. These folks were also working pros that saw their business change by this technology. The price of that back was 23K back then. Not many of these backs surface on eBay or elsewhere because frankly many of them are still in use today. They have been updated by firmware and software to keep up with the times and still produce beautiful images. But the technology parade moves forward and newer higher mega-pixel backs have been introduced and these have come to the market at a price point too. This will continue on the medium format market. Larger - more mega-pixel chips will undoubtly be introduced. Faster ISO abilities, faster shooting speeds and such will most likely follow too.
Pros and others do a return on investment calculation to see what they can afford. It is really quite simple looking at the cost of film, processing, proofing, post production and such and then compare those costs to a monthly cost of a digital back. There are very few instances where the advantage isn't on the digital side. Let's also remember that there are no more Polaroids. There is instant verification that you have the shot. Your client sees the image right away, you have a competitive edge in the marketplace and more. Think about the landscape photographer. You hike hours, set up and wait for the shot. With a camera like a P25 you are shooting nearly 4x5 quality images and when you take the exposure you know you have it. I will be bold enough to say this...I studied with Ansel Adams back in the 70's and I know without a doubt that if he were still alive he would embrace this technology. The ability to capture a full range of darks to highlights and then to be able to see these images printed on a printer that can print that full range would have been his life long goal come true. You just can't do that with film. Film can never capture the range of exposure that digital can. Look at the image presently up on this sites home page. I was there I took a similar shot and mine is a 32x49 image on the wall of my home. It is stunning. I would never have done that image with film.
People can say what they want about cost and such and people can stay with film or move to digital. It's an individual’s choice. In the end it is all about the image, not what it was taken with. I ask that photographers keep an open mind. Use the camera and method of capture as a tool. Select the tool that works best for you. If you are a working pro and can afford it a digital back will give you the absolute best image there can be Chances are pretty good too that your return on investment and ability to please your clients will be pretty positive too. If you are a hobbyist and can afford to purchase a back you will be producing images that will amaze you.
These systems will always be pricey and that is because it is a limited marketplace. The technology will always be improving and today’s technology will be less expensive as newer technology is introduced. So the arguments will never go away. Medium format systems will be here for a long time to come. Do you really think Mamiya would be introducing a new medium format camera line if the medium format market were dead? And like the car industry there will be Fords and Chevys and there will be Lexus and Mercedes. Both will get you there but it is about the quality and the experience in the end.
BR
Kevin Raber
VP -Phase One
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The resolution of a lens/sensor combination is never equal to what the lens or sensor can resolve. If the resolution of one becomes perfect (infinite), the resolution of the combination will be that of the other.
This works for film, and may have some application for digital. There is no real benefit of either a lens or film to get too much better than the other. If the lens can resolve 200 lp/mm and the film 1000 lp/mm, the image resolution is about 165 lp/mm. Increase the film's resolution to 10,000 lp/mm, the combination is about 195 lp/mm, but the film would cost plenty more. Maybe better to get a better lens first. Or go to a larger format of the 1000 lp/mm film.
Then you need to consider the printing process (how much of the available information can actually get put on paper). And then a person looks at that print. How much of it can they actually see? The chain will approach the weakest link, but will never be better. That is why when the details start to get really fine, people break their loupe for help.
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help development
If you can tell me what it is we're trying to "develop", I can perhaps be more helpful.
Well, I presume the Standfordians from the irate arguments were developing AI.
I stand by all my predictions and you'll just have to be a little patient about discrediting me.
Rest assured, I have no such intent. I have reason to believe that "credibility" and "discrediting" are not opposites in any way, shape or form, are they?
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Price is determined by other factors than quality. If I could make a lens as good as a Zeiss, it would likely be too expensive to sell, or I would have to lose money on it.
It certainly is. In this era of globalisation, you get what you do your research on. Prices for effectively the same item can vary enormously. A Canon lithium battery for my D60 cost A$110 in a camera store. A third party battery (presumably just as good) cost $100. A bit of research on the net can locate a supplier of another third party brand costing just A$35. Hope my camera doesn't explode one day. If it does, I'll probably think, 'you get what you pay for' :D .
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I understand that no less a name than Leica has cooperated with Sigma ...
I have heard a similar story with respect to Minolta making some lenses for Leica. Anyway, this seems to confirm what Mike Johnson said a few months ago. In my words, not his: the materials, optical theory, quality control principles, computers and such needed to design and produce a very high quality lens are widely available, and all major lens makers have access to them. I am fairly sure that Nikon, Canon, Olypus, Pentax or yes even Sigma could make lenses a good as the best from Leica and Zeiss, and would do so if there were a market for them at the high prices that would be required to be profitable.
Perhaps as with Japanese car makers, it is a matter of gradually establishing enough respect in the marketplace to be able to make and sell progressively better products at the top end or the range.
P. S. I think we need some new jargon for format sizes: using "medium format" for a format that is far bigger than 99% of all cameras has been anachronistic for a long time, and using the ill-fated name "APS-C" is a bit weird too. I propose that up to 2/3" is "compact", 4/3 to DX are "digital medium formats" or "mainstream DSLR formats", and from 24x36mm up is "digital large format".
P. P. S. The higher speed, lower resolution mode of the forthcoming Nikon D2X is in some sense the new smallest digital SLR format out there: about 17.4x11.6mm, compared to the 17.3x13mm of the Olympus E-300. I wonder how it will fare for sports and such, with lenses like the Nikon 200/2 matching the FOV of about a 300/2.8 on an EOS-1D or 400/2.8 on with 35mm frame size.
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BJL, any idea why Fuji went to such an elegant and probably expensive solution with different sized sensors when adding neutral density to a highlight sensor of same size would be accomplish the same thing?
bob
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although they did admit to being able to distinguish three grapefruits placed next to eachother, against a darker background
When photographing distant objects, the limiting factor is haze, dust and shimmering in the atmosphere. These extreme claims of license plate reading from outer space seem ludicrous to me.
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What type of shooting do you typically do?
T-1000
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Yes, it is strange to live in a world where an $8,000 camera is considered "affordable."
There's an interesting book called Luxury Fever (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691070113/qid=1104586081/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_11/104-6293214-6896746?v=glance&s=books) that talks about the trend where items that used to be considered luxuries become considered necessities. His textbook example are how many people are convinced they need $2000+ outdoor grills even though they perform no little better than $200 ones.
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Thanks for all that, Kevin. Those that take the time to read and think about your words should find nothing to dispute.
These systems will always be pricey and that is because it is a limited marketplace.
This seems clear and obvious. A full on Hassie system decades ago was no cheaper than high end digital now, relative to $ value then.
I've had not a moment of regret about the money I spent for my 1ds, but I'm passing on 1ds2 for reasons already specified. Do you see MF DSLR's with the sensor quality of p25 any time in the foreseeable future? Do you see something of that quality for around $10,000 coming up in the next few years? I can't see $30,000 coming up in my life any time soon for an MF digital system. Do you have any "insider" knowledge or hunches about what to expect from Mamiya ZD? Any chance it will be somewhat comparable to basic 1ds quality, but double the effective resolution? I'd start a serious bux acquisition program for that, but $25,000 just for a back would only be realistic if I find a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. I assume you guys have done the necessary development and manufacturing cost/market size analyses and $25,000 is the optimal figure, but that sure is out of reach for a lot of people who otherwise don't mind spending big money for photo gear. No matter how good it is, it also has to be possible.
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Improve either one of them, not necessarily in pixel count for the sensor but pixel quality, and you'll get sharper, better images.
Yes, this has been declared and generally agreed with (me included) countless times. HOWEVER, just by increasing sensor resolution and/or quality you reach a point of diminishing returns, which we've already started to see with 1ds and which is dramatically noticeable with 1ds2. At f16 with a Canon 50mm compact macro lens a 1ds2 is hardly perceptibly better than a 1ds. No lens shorter than 35mm comes anywhere close to the quality of a Canon 50mm compact macro so what can we expect with a 1dsMKIII and wide angle lenses? You pay the big money for the ultradense sensor, you pay the big storage overhead for the big files and the big processing overhead, but quality improvements get ever slimmer; no way to go upward except larger formats, unless you don't mind paying huge prices for ever tinier improvements. What's the problem with larger formats, anyway? There's better lenses available, especially at the wide end and cost is not likely to remain prohibitive very much longer, if you consider $8000 for a 35mm body not prohibitive. Good MF wide angle primes are cheaper than mediocre 35mm wide zooms, and there's almost nothing available but zooms. 1dsMKIII? I don't even want 1dsMKII. I'd rather pay twice the money for something that will be twice as good as 1ds than buy a 1ds2 that's at best 50% better than 1ds, but in fact hardly ever even that much better (only with a handful of super lenses and then shot at f8 or so).
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Well, I presume the Standfordians from the irate arguments were developing AI.
No, they were TRYING to. They were theorizing and thinking and debating about it. They never had a shred of any practical demonstration; just a lot of essentially blind faith. "I'm too smart for faith in any human dimensions beyond physical, but dumb enough for blind faith in AI". In any case, how can I be "helpful" in this effort? How does it matter how we natter here where this effort is concerned? Those folks thought that we'd have some serious AI long before now with computers not nearly as powerful as what we ended up with and any high school kid now has access to. Those AI types had to re-calibrate their ambitions and so far simulating flatworm behavior is also not working out too well. Living organisms have hidden (spiritual) dimensions that most of us can't even perceive, what to say of program digital imitations of. Our understanding of the total human being is about as naive as the understanding that cargo cults had of airplanes, only more so.
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Quality is not always proportional to price. I don't think there are many very high quality/very low price lenses. However, there may be expensive poor lenses.
Price is determined by other factors than quality. If I could make a lens as good as a Zeiss, it would likely be too expensive to sell, or I would have to lose money on it.
There are also niche market products that have no real competition. Their price is driven more by supply/demand than quaility. I recall about 30 years ago I need a bolt to repair the clutch on my Porsche. It cost $35. Way too much, but there was a single supplier of a very low volume market. The bolt was pretty much just a bolt with an odd head. Not expra high quality. The parts guy asked me what the car was worth with the bolt. About $6000. What was it worth without the bolt. Parts. He said the bolt was a bargain, and it was.
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Watching what's happening at the sub-dSLR level I wouldn't be surprised if Canon/Nikon got one of their legs chewed off by PanaLeica.
The Panasonic FZ series is gaining a lot of popularity. Good cameras with Leica glass.
Panasonic is large enough to have the capital to push forward.
They've tested the water with the LC1/D2 rangefinder. While it's a vastly overpriced and a somewhat crippled camera it has displayed their ability to produce a great digital file.
They've bought into IS. Just need to move it to the camera body.
If you were to mix in the ability of Sigma to volume produce Leica design/quality controlled lenses....
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Fuji want to do it all on one sensor and in a single exposure, so the highlights need to be measured with photosites packed in between the main photosites. Since the added photosites are only used to measure bright light and only need to cover a range of a few stops, they can be far smaller than the regular photosites. With Fuji's roughly octagonal photosites, the small highlight photosites seem to fit almost entirely into gaps that were there between the bigger photosites anyway.
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There is another interesting assessment of the limits of high resolution photography at gigapxl.org, including atmospheric effects, which are distinctly worse for terrestrial photography than with a telescope looking up through the thin, clear air from the top of a mountain.
They estimate an angular limit on resolution at 50% MTF due to atmospheric effects to about 6,000 line pairs per radian, or in other words, 6,000 line pairs across a roughly normal field of view of 57º (one radian). To be generous, about 10,000x15,000 pixels for a normal FOV would be at that limit, so maybe 150MP.
From a satellite 100Km up, that resolution limit at 50% MTF would be about one line pair per 14 meters. With the far lower MTF needed to barely resolve text, the graphs suggest a limit of about 20,000 lp/radian, still 5 meters per line pair.
Maybe on a very clear day they can see grapefruit, on the top of a mountain above all the dust and heat haze!