51–60 of 98 posts
this will be an expensive piece of gear. that moonlit video was just insane.
As a filmmaker, I'm more impressed by the burning incense. I don't even make live-action video (I do animation), and I STILL desperately want a camera that can do that. I suspect that the results of showing that video to a room full of filmmakers can be summed up in the phrase "Shut up and take my money."
In a way it's kind of simple, isn't it? Having "only" Full HD on a 35 mm sensor simply means you have much larger individual potential wells, capturing more photons per pixel. What I'm really wondering about is the dynamic range - wouldn't that also drastically increase?
Too bad the whole camera business wasted a huge amount of resouces over ten years on a stupid tinier and tinier pixels race.
2. The 5 megapixel camera on an iPhone 4 is pretty amazing. I wouldn't call it a waste of resources.
3. Displacing MF from high-end camera manufacturers requires tiny pixels. You can shoot pictures for e.g. magazines on a $2,000 D600 today, but in 2003 you would have needed at least $4,000 MF camera plus a $10,000+ scanner. Yes, this is just a niche of the photography market, but it's an important, high-profile niche.
In my mind, the quality-conscious consumers were taken by digital at 6 MP, and the studios were taken by digital at 24 MP. There are a few morons around with more money than smarts who will buy crappy cameras because the numbers on the box are higher, but it's clear to me that they're not driving the market right now.
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Too bad the whole camera business wasted a huge amount of resouces over ten years on a stupid tinier and tinier pixels race.
1. Noise increases as pixel size increases. So you can't just make the pixels bigger. 2. The 5 megapixel camera on an iPhone 4 is pretty amazing. I wouldn't call it a waste of resources. 3. Displacing MF from high-end camera manufacturers requires tiny pixels. You can shoot pictures for e.g. magazines on a $2,000 D600 today, but in 2003 you would have needed at least $4,000 MF camera plus a $10,000+ scanner. Yes, thi…
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Native resolution of this baby looks to be 864 mm^2 / 19 micron^2 ~= 45MPix, in line with the latest Nikon and with rumors of high-density FF Canon. The innovation here is noise reduction and not the sensor itself... obviously Canon will charge an arm an a leg for that video camera - and won't ever make it into a DSLR to not cannibalize their profits.
I'm fairly certain they meant that pixels are 19µm on a side, not in area, since they state: > 7.5-times the surface area of the pixels on the CMOS sensor incorporated in Canon's top-of-the-line EOS-1D X and other digital SLR cameras That puts a 35mm sensor right around HD video resolution, or in the 2-2.1MP range.
>The newly developed CMOS sensor features pixels measuring 19 microns square in size
So there is a possibility that the pixels are merged by the image processor after data is read off the sensor.
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Given the choice between 24 MP with very high sensitivity or 2 MP with ridiculously high sensitivity, I'm not sure the industry is wrong.
But they aren't the only two options. With the quality of lens on the average compact camera for instance, I struggle to see any real noticable improvement above around 5 MP.
There are also physical limits. The angular resolution depends on the lens aperture size. Smaller cameras have smaller lenses with smaller apertures, which must have lower angular resolution just because of the laws of physics. At the same time, engineering trade-offs mean that smaller lenses usually have larger apertures proportional to their focal length, so this difference is not quite proportional.
But these small cameras do not have unreasonable resolutions. I just looked up the specs for a tiny point-and-shoot, the Nikon Coolpix AW100. From the specs (5-25mm lens, 28-140mm equivalent) we can figure out that the sensor is probably about 6.2mm across (36mm * 5mm / 28mm). The lens is f/3.9, which gives a resolution of about 400 lp/mm in visible light, or about 5000 pixels across 6.2mm. The sensor is 16 MP with about 4600 pixels across it. So the sensor is close to the limits of the optical system.
If you're having trouble noticing improvement above 5 MP, it is probably due to technique rather than equipment.
* You need to use a tripod. (Or a flash. This should be apparent.)
* You must not open the lens fully, this will blur the image from lens imperfections. (Look at the MTF charts of your favorite lens. They're way worse when the lens is fully open.)
* You must not close the lens more than a couple stops, this will blur the image from diffraction of light through the lens aperture. (Rayleigh limit. You can do the math yourself.)
* You need to be very careful with focus. (In my experience, the "hyperfocal distance" is total bunk when you're doing critical work, which makes sense because the hyperfocal formula is based on the assumption that diffraction is irrelevant. When you want maximum sharpness, you'll be shooting near the diffraction limit so it will be relevant, and therefore the hyperfocal formula is wrong. If I remember right, the adjusted formula is based on lens travel distance from farthest to closest subject point, but I've been using the same lens for so long I use intuition.)
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of course we would, but photographers wouldn't be too impressed with only capturing 1920(?)x1080 resolution. This gains it's light gathering abilities by simply having much larger "pixels" on the sensor, which can collect more photons. This is the same principal used on the highest end canon eos body, the 1DX, which has slightly lower resolution than the 5DmkIII in order to gain sensitivity.
Native resolution of this baby looks to be 864 mm^2 / 19 micron^2 ~= 45MPix, in line with the latest Nikon and with rumors of high-density FF Canon. The innovation here is noise reduction and not the sensor itself... obviously Canon will charge an arm an a leg for that video camera - and won't ever make it into a DSLR to not cannibalize their profits.
Cannibalizing? Not even close. Just the next generation of cameras! They did the same thing between the ... I think it was EOS 50D and EOS 60D
I'm curious how this performs with fast motion and if it's a general-purpose sensor or only suitable for low light. Anyone know?
I always find it depressing when I take a picture by moonlight and it ends up looking very much like a picture taken by sunlight, as opposed to looking like the scene looks to our eyes. Always have to keep in mind that a CCD != rods and cones. Sensitivity is nice but as far as I'm concerned, dynamic range is the main thing that's needed in digital photography. DSLR sensors have gotten much, much better over the last…
There's a lot of great information on how to best capture the moon.
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Yes, an f/0.7 aperture is a ridiculously wide aperture (thus, it lets in a lot of light[1]), two stops brighter than f/1.4 (a "stop" means a doubling of the amount of light; f/1.2 lenses are the fastest lenses commonly available, and they'll cost around $2k), or four stops faster than f/2.8 (which is what the fastest commonly available zoom lenses are, and they're expensive too). Leica make a very rare f/0.95 lens th…
Voigtlander is making an 0.95 25mm m4/3 lens, and it's only $1100 or so.
They definitely give a cinematic quality to captured video.
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And a cheap lens with low optical resolution makes a higher number of pixels effectively useless, so it's still a strange development.
Higher pixel counts give less noise assuming the total light collection area is the same. Normally you get a bit less light collection area due to the gaps between pixels with a higher resolution sensor but overall I think higher pixel count generally wins, especially when working at the low iso end. So as long as the cost is reasonable why not stick lots of pixels in.
Of course, if you have more resolution, you can reduce the resolution in post-processing, and that will also reduce the noise. But then you might as well have used larger pixels to start with.
So I think the right strategy is, figure out how much resolution you need and how large a sensor you can afford, and then make the pixels as large as possible at that resolution. This appears to be what Canon has done.