Prototypes of future digital ultra-compact pocketable camera - Will there be much improvement in the images?
anir...@gmail.com
good quality photos (in term of exposures, sharpness, zooming, manual/
autoshots). DSLR is just simply too big to be used as a pocketable
camera. Will anyone guess that in the next 10 years or so, ultra
compact (pocketable) digital camera can EVER reach the quality of
today's DSLR? Or it is just an impossible physical size to have a
good zoom, plus large sensor size to be fitted into a ultra compact
size? Remember, the size SD card never changes, but 5 years ago, you
are dealing with 32, 64 and 128 MB, versus 2, 4 and 8 GB size today
(on the same physical size). Does the light path that pass through a
lens can be shortened to make the camera thin? Perhaps this is going
into the technology of building lens or its materials (glass,plastic
or ceramic lens?).
I hope this discussion will not end up with another fight between P&S
and DSLR. I still feel that there are a great numbers out there who
like to use a compact camera, instead a bulky ultra zoom or DSLR. I
can even settle down with a Canon G7/Nikon P6000's size which has
picture quality at par with Canon 50D or Nikon D300. I can still put
my G7 in my pocket.
Thanks for the discussion.
David J Taylor
> I am not a professional photographer, but I do like to take reasonable
> good quality photos (in term of exposures, sharpness, zooming, manual/
> autoshots). DSLR is just simply too big to be used as a pocketable
> camera. Will anyone guess that in the next 10 years or so, ultra
> compact (pocketable) digital camera can EVER reach the quality of
> today's DSLR? Or it is just an impossible physical size to have a
> good zoom, plus large sensor size to be fitted into a ultra compact
> size? Remember, the size SD card never changes, but 5 years ago, you
> are dealing with 32, 64 and 128 MB, versus 2, 4 and 8 GB size today
> (on the same physical size). Does the light path that pass through a
> lens can be shortened to make the camera thin? Perhaps this is going
> into the technology of building lens or its materials (glass,plastic
> or ceramic lens?).
Large sensor + large zoom range => larger camera.
The best small-sensor cameras can produce prints up to A4 size - is that
good enough for you?
I find that even on a 2MP display, images from my 5MP DSLR still look
better than images from my 7MP wide-zoom-range compact. The images are
sharper and crisper, which is probably mostly due to trying to squeeze a
28-280mm (eq) zoom into a pocket-sized camera. The limitations are due to
basic physics, unlike the SD-card capacity.
David
Alan Smithee
news:ce395e0f-6bff-45fa...@v42g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
I know what you mean.
The Leice M Series (although not ultra compact) already has the image
quality in a compact body. So, it's not image quality that's the limiting
factor, it's the SLR design that is.
I would imagine the question is when can manufacturers develop an electronic
viewfinder which is as good as an optical viewfinder and also when can they
develop a contrast detection AF system that can perform as well as phase
detection AF. My guess is that it's only a matter of time, in fact it
wouldn't surprise me if R&D departments already have this in the pipeline.
Then, once we all have our high quality compact bodies with viewfinders that
have a greater resolution than real life and an AF system that locks on and
starts tracking what you are looking at instantaneously, then the next
limiting factor would be how much light the sensor can absorb. This is
where something like super sensitive black silicon sensors will come in. We
also won't need to worry about getting shallow DOF either because optical
DOF will become a thing of the past and DOF will be added by the in-camera
processor or in post production with a slider. ;-)
Trev
<anir...@gmail.com> anir...@gmail.com bashed on keyboard and typed:
The size of the sensor in width and height sets the size of the lens. The
more pixels crammed in the more susceptible to electronic noise, the more
noise reduction has to be used the softer the image.
Then again For my use and A4 prints the 1/1.6 sensor suffices
--
Trev
Nobody is perfect.
But Being a Yorkshire man is as close as you can get.
Keith nuttle
Zoom lens requires a lot of glass to bend the light rays on to the
sensor. My Olympus C-740 has 11 elements in 7 groups. Light passes
through a glass or any medium in very defined ways that can only be
changed by changing the properties of the glass or changing its shape.
Someone could respond that it could be done on the sensor but like the
cpu (see below) there are physical limits to the number of pixel that
can be placed on a chip. So it is unlikely that you will ever see an
ultra thin zoom camera.
One other physical limit that has been meet and can not be passed is
with cpu for computers. Physical laws state that at a certain size and
speed there will be electron tunneling where the pathway of the
electrons can no longer be controlled. This was a big topic in computer
magazines in the 1980's. That limit was hit Pentium 4 3.0 GHz chips.
After that to increase through put the manufactures started the duo, and
quad processors which all run at about half that rate 1.6GHz.
Alan Smithee
news:J0Gcl.13452$yr3....@nlpi068.nbdc.sbc.com...
> anir...@gmail.com wrote:
> There are physical limits even in this day and age of change. A good Zoom
> lens requires a lot of glass to bend the light rays on to the sensor. My
> Olympus C-740 has 11 elements in 7 groups. Light passes through a glass
> or any medium in very defined ways that can only be changed by changing
> the properties of the glass or changing its shape. Someone could respond
> that it could be done on the sensor but like the cpu (see below) there are
> physical limits to the number of pixel that can be placed on a chip. So it
> is unlikely that you will ever see an ultra thin zoom camera.
>
> One other physical limit that has been meet and can not be passed is with
> cpu for computers. Physical laws state that at a certain size and speed
> there will be electron tunneling where the pathway of the electrons can no
> longer be controlled. This was a big topic in computer magazines in the
> 1980's. That limit was hit Pentium 4 3.0 GHz chips. After that to
> increase through put the manufactures started the duo, and quad processors
> which all run at about half that rate 1.6GHz.
What about the human eye? Although the CPU maybe big, the lens isn't.
Keith nuttle
through the lens into the eye. If you wear bifocals you should remember
how quickly the brain translated the curved line produced by the lens in
the glasses into a straight line. Algorithms can not produce as sharp
of an image as an optical lens. That is why some pictures through a
high quality lens do not look correct, they are too good.
Alan Smithee
You seem to know what you are talking about, but for me it's way over my
head. What camera are you using?
Chris Malcolm
It's difficult to make exact comparisons of sensor size, because the
human eye is in effect several different cameras simultaneously doing
different jobs, and some of them use a rather low res very wide angle
view on a very curved sensor. I suspect it's a fair approximation to
say that the lens is of roughly P&S dimensions because so is the
effective comparable sensor. The same optics and physics applies.
Many people don't appreciate that the apparently detailed view we get
from the eye is in effect a stitched panorama. There's only a rather
small high res portion of the retina, and our view of a view is
sampled at points of detailed interest by very high speed jumps of the
eyeball (saccades) to point at each item of interest. The brain
stitches these together into the impression of a much wider detailed
view. For example, when reading a book, typically only a word or two
on the line are in clear legible high resolution.
That's how the eye-brain has solved the data rate problem of
transferring and understanding images of the world at speeds high
enough to play ball games. (Our ball games exploit most of the high
speed capabilities of the human eye-brain complex to their limits.)
There's also a fantastic amount of crud and distortion in the basic
image as sampled by the retina. For example the "wiring" in the sense
of nerves and blood vessels are in front of the light sensing
elements. This casts a shadow of its detailed twiggery over every
image. The brain however does such a good job of cleaning up the image
that most of the time it looks as though our eyes are very much better
than they really are. Most of the time we don't even notice the large
blind spot where the frontal twiggery is bundled up and taken through
a hole in the retina to the back side.
The human retina is a is a highly tuned and ingeniously compensated
development of a really stupid original design. The designer managed
to get in right in the cephalopod eye, but the absence of bones in the
cephalopods has put serious constraints on how far that superior eye
can travel.
--
Chris Malcolm
mike
keith_...@sbcglobal.net says...
There are significant physical limitations while camera technology
requires the focusing of an image through glass optics onto a sensor
which measures amplitude and frequency distribution of the light
striking its surface.
However, if a detector could be designed that could directly measure and
store not only the amplitude and frequency distribution, but also the
relative phase and angle of incidence of the light striking its surface
then the 'lens' could be done away with altogether.
Obviously, such technology does not exist at present (well - not to a
practically utilisable extent), although existing imaging methodologies
such as synthetic aperture imaging, phase array radar, holography etc
utilise some of these principles. But if it is developed in the future
it would allow a data-file to be collected that could be post-processed
to provide anything from wide angle to extreme telephoto to macro-
closeup, with a dialed-up depth of field and resolution.
Theoretically, such a sensor - operating entirely without glass optics,
could provide images with performance and resolution equal to or
exceeding that of any lens with a front-end lens diameter smaller than
that of the sensor.
Mike