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Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

petapixel.com

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Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#51

digital cameras carried on planes in the early days had cosmic ray issues too. So they sent them by boat. Hell. The ones today do. This is a weird article though. A lot of cameras compensate for dead pixels and cosmic rays. It should also have been designed in every camera to have unique file names. It’s ridiculous they all don’t.

It's just them performing dark frame subtraction at short shutter speeds too, not just long ones.

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are several sources of pixel noise, some of which are temperature dependent. Making the sensor cold reduces the temperature-dependent pixel noise background.

So less sensor noise, but all your lenses are foggy now. Haha

It's not the lens, it's the sensor that's kept cold- in practice, people taking low-noise shots would use something like this: https://amscope.com/products/mt5800-ccd

If you put it in a freezer, you can use desiccant or other strategies to avoid moisture-fogging. Or just wait til everything reaches equilibrium?

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#53
post #20

Nikon should fix file numbering in general.

The file numbering system is unique enough that you're not going to have the same file and folder name together, and you can set the prefix, iirc. My photos are in /photos/yyyy/yyyymmdd/nikon1xx/dscnxxxx.jpg and I've been using this system since 1997

No it's not unique enough.

D750 has this naming scheme: DSC_4203.jpg (or nef). Which obviously wraps at 9999.

Z7 has SZ7_1234.jpg - still not better.

Several subfolders don't count, it's the same folder that is important.

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#54
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every photo taken shortens the life of a sensor.

To add to this, with those particular cameras(it’s the frame I shoot on), you’re encouraged by the form factor and ergonomics to turn them off when idle to get the most out of the smallish battery, they boot in like 1s. A battery is good for ~350 shutter pulls, I don’t want to use one of those every time I think about taking a picture. Also, a dead pixel is not a ruined photo, it’s a minor inconvenience in editing at…

> minor inconvenience

Do you have software that automatically fixes this issue in all the pictures at once? Because as a non-professional I can only think of a very manual approach.

On my old phone, dust made its way into one of the cameras and now all of those photos are forever ruined (or until I find a way to somewhat automate this fixing)

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every photo taken shortens the life of a sensor.

Yeah, but that’s like saying your mechanic shouldn’t take test drives because every mile driven shortens the life of the car. The shutter, which is replaceable, is normally rated, for 200k-1mm actuations MTBF. Even taking a reference photo every day won’t truly impact shutter life. Anecdotally: I have a 20 year old Canon 1D that is 50% over it’s rated shutter life, and that camera was used for photojournalism (used H…

[deleted]

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#56
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The file numbering system is unique enough that you're not going to have the same file and folder name together, and you can set the prefix, iirc. My photos are in /photos/yyyy/yyyymmdd/nikon1xx/dscnxxxx.jpg and I've been using this system since 1997

No it's not unique enough. D750 has this naming scheme: DSC_4203.jpg (or nef). Which obviously wraps at 9999. Z7 has SZ7_1234.jpg - still not better. Several subfolders don't count, it's the same folder that is important.

The D5100 creates a new folder when it wraps.

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#57
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every photo taken shortens the life of a sensor.

Yeah, but that’s like saying your mechanic shouldn’t take test drives because every mile driven shortens the life of the car. The shutter, which is replaceable, is normally rated, for 200k-1mm actuations MTBF. Even taking a reference photo every day won’t truly impact shutter life. Anecdotally: I have a 20 year old Canon 1D that is 50% over it’s rated shutter life, and that camera was used for photojournalism (used H…

Most (all?) mirrorless cameras these days have an electronic shutter too, so it's not like it would put any extra miles on the mechanical shutter.

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#58
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, with those particular cameras(it’s the frame I shoot on), you’re encouraged by the form factor and ergonomics to turn them off when idle to get the most out of the smallish battery, they boot in like 1s. A battery is good for ~350 shutter pulls, I don’t want to use one of those every time I think about taking a picture. Also, a dead pixel is not a ruined photo, it’s a minor inconvenience in editing at…

> minor inconvenience Do you have software that automatically fixes this issue in all the pictures at once? Because as a non-professional I can only think of a very manual approach. On my old phone, dust made its way into one of the cameras and now all of those photos are forever ruined (or until I find a way to somewhat automate this fixing)

Any real photo editor will allow you to batch a patch heal operations. Lightroom, Photoshop, GIMP, Darktable, etc... all support this.

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#59

The noise reduction they're referring to is dark frame subtraction used for thermal noise and defective hot pixel removal (the latter is what the ISS has to worry about.) Numerous cameras from other companies allow for forcing that on at any speed via menu options, not just slower shutter speeds. I had this feature available on an early 2010's Olympus. They called it "Noise Reduction" (not "noise filter", that's diff…

I guess the difference is some better algorithms to identify cosmic ray issues and the like, as oppossed to simple noise reduction.

"Noise reduction" is not dark frame subtraction.

What they are very clearly describing is dark frame subtraction, as they repeatedly mention damage from cosmic rays. Things are not helped by this being a press release munged up by a writer.

"Noise reduction" is where the camera's image processor applies smoothing over different channels as part of all the other processing it does, such as vignette correction, chromatic diffraction compensation, and remapping for lens distortion.

Some but not all of this is bypassed when doing RAW images. RAW processors (especially from the camera manufacturer) typically apply similar corrections automatically, but you have varying degrees of control over this. They're usually better quality due to more computational capabilities, and faster software development cycle vs stuff baked into the camera's ASICs or firmware.

Re: Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos

#60
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not unique enough. D750 has this naming scheme: DSC_4203.jpg (or nef). Which obviously wraps at 9999. Z7 has SZ7_1234.jpg - still not better. Several subfolders don't count, it's the same folder that is important.

The D5100 creates a new folder when it wraps.

Yes. On camera it's not an issue. The issue comes when you want to store more than 10000 pictures (or even a subset who happen to have the same numbering) in the same folder. But I already wrote that subfolders don't count.

To quote Ken Rockwell:

>File numbers have three programmable letters (good), but then an underscore and only 4 digits, so it only can make 10,000 shots before file names repeat. At 120 FPS it's trivially easy to make more than 10,000 shots in just a half hour of shooting sports, and now you have to keep all those images in separate folders because you can't put two files with the same name in the same folder. Nikon needs to replace the underscore with a digit so we have at least five digits in our file numbers. Even LEICA's pokey LEICA M9 of 2009 uses seven digits in their file names to prevent duplicates, and that camera barely worked at 1 FPS.

It's an arbitrary restriction in the camera software. It needs to be fixed.

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