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News: At last! ISO control, pixel by pixel and that's what it should be!

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Can you sat HDR? Well here's the design I have been waiting to come up from Canon's back rooms. It's about 5 years, I'd imagine since a company in Northern California established a consortium of MFRS with interest in a low-cost advanced CMOS sensor with each individual pixel having its own A-D converter and being addressed separately. There's a lot of valuable consequences to this design being actually incorporated into a camera. For one there's improved object recognition but more important for us is high dynamic range.

"The present invention is directed to an image capturing apparatus and an image capturing method which are capable of appropriately expanding the dynamic range of an image sensor.

. . . .

According to an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, preliminary image capturing is performed using the image capturing unit, and the exposure time is assigned to each pixel based on the result of the preliminary image capturing. Image capturing can thus be performed with a wide dynamic range without a loss of highlight detail and a loss of shadow detail. – USPTO Appl. No. 12/630,594, ¶¶ 11 & 14
Read more here

So canon, when will we see it in a new body. How about a 1Ds Mark IV? Imagine, 35 MP and high dynamic range!

But do we have the lenses?

Asher
 

Nill Toulme

New member
. . . .
According to an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, preliminary image capturing is performed using the image capturing unit, and the exposure time is assigned to each pixel based on the result of the preliminary image capturing. ...

This seems to be suggesting not so much per-pixel ISO as per-pixel shutter speed!

Nill
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
I am not sure I understand. For starters what is an ad-converter?
A-D converter: analog-(to)-digital converter.

This takes the analog voltage developed by each sensor photodetector and develops a digital description of it (often in 12 or 14 bits).

Best regards,

Doug
 

Joe Thomas

New member
A-D converter: analog-(to)-digital converter.

This takes the analog voltage developed by each sensor photodetector and develops a digital description of it (often in 12 or 14 bits).

Best regards,

Doug

Very interesting. Thanks for the explanation.
 

Ben Rubinstein

pro member
A mechanical shutter is itself rather a throwback that is far from being necessary. The 1D had an electronic shutter as do various lower end Nkon's and that pretty much gives an unlimited x-sync availability that I as a wedding shooter would kill for.

Take an electronic shutter with this pixel based iso technology and an improvement in EVF and contrast detect focusing and the cameras of tomorrow will be much smaller and lighter, far more versatile and with DR that we can only dream about. Oh and it should be here in 5 years or so at the current rate of progress in digital technology. We don't need to think in terms of the limitations of the crude mechanical devices of the film era any more.

Oh and it will probably put another couple of nails in the coffin of professional photography as the entire digital revolution had done since day one..
 
A mechanical shutter is itself rather a throwback that is far from being necessary. The 1D had an electronic shutter as do various lower end Nkon's and that pretty much gives an unlimited x-sync availability that I as a wedding shooter would kill for.

Take an electronic shutter with this pixel based iso technology and an improvement in EVF and contrast detect focusing and the cameras of tomorrow will be much smaller and lighter, far more versatile and with DR that we can only dream about. Oh and it should be here in 5 years or so at the current rate of progress in digital technology. We don't need to think in terms of the limitations of the crude mechanical devices of the film era any more.

Oh and it will probably put another couple of nails in the coffin of professional photography as the entire digital revolution had done since day one..

Hi Ben,

With current sensor technology, the chip must be in total dark and electronically reset before an exposure can be registered. Without a mechanical shutter, the sensor will have trouble getting a clean reset, and image quality will suffer. Whether that deterioration is acceptable or not will be a debate, no doubt.

Secondly, a contrast detect focusing is relatively slow, because it will need to step through a number of trial focus settings before it can optimize. Whether the resulting slower number of frames, and/or shutter lag are acceptable, depends on one's shooting requirements.

As for nails in coffins, Professionals do need to justify their cost by delivering results that are better than the cheap imitations. That requires not only technical image quality (which is not what comes out of the camera) but is also created in the capture phase of the shooting and in postprocessing. On top of that, during the whole process, there is marketing involved as well, as you know and apply successfully.

Cheers,
Bart
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
Hi, Bart,

With current sensor technology, the chip must be in total dark and electronically reset before an exposure can be registered.
Not quite. The EOS 40D, in Live View with Silent Shooting, does not have the sensor in the dark at the beginning of the exposure cycle. It is reset overall electronically and then "turned loose", row-by-row, emulating first curtain operation.

Best regards,

Doug
 

Ben Rubinstein

pro member
Hi Ben,

As for nails in coffins, Professionals do need to justify their cost by delivering results that are better than the cheap imitations. That requires not only technical image quality (which is not what comes out of the camera) but is also created in the capture phase of the shooting and in postprocessing. On top of that, during the whole process, there is marketing involved as well, as you know and apply successfully.

Cheers,
Bart

Not as successfully as people who have driven me almost out of business with only a fraction of my skillset or vision. You buy a couple of D700's, couple of lenses and an sb-900 and all you need then is sucessful marketing. My main rival is friendly enough, we call each other up about once a month. I told him last time that he'd taken most of my business, this is what he said: 'I don't know why Beni, I truly believe that you are the top Jewish wedding photographer in the UK today and admit it freely to people, I guess people are only interested in cheap these days..'

Guy here in Jerusalem, one of the top in the market, even about to start selling courses in wedding photography. This guy is a joke, awful lighting, awful composition, uses a 28mm focal length for full length portraits close up (horrible to see), etc. But if you have the equipment do the job for you and sucessful marketing you can do it. You just couldn't do that 10 years ago but now big studios are going bust due to the connection between incredible technology and a 'good enough' mindset among those paying. BTW I don't work at all here in Jerusalem so it's not sour grapes, I'm a UK wedding shooter.
 

Ed Rizk

New member
How cool!

I have not heard of this sensor anywhere else. One could configure it like a graduated filter, or darken parts of the photo or any combination of things. Would color balance also be adjustable pixel by pixel?
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I have not heard of this sensor anywhere else. One could configure it like a graduated filter, or darken parts of the photo or any combination of things. Would color balance also be adjustable pixel by pixel?
Hi Ed,

Yes there are so many uses one could imagine. Together with a mechanical shutter closed, one could start off doing the focus, with a separate sensor. Then one would take the picture, keeping the sensels for darker areas switched on long enough until the count allowed the noise to be beaten by a good margin. That would be a user setting.When it was all over, the shutter would close.

However, if one wished, one could bipass the mechanical shutter and take pictures at 1,000 or 100,000 frames per second.

Asher
 

Alain Briot

pro member
Not as successfully as people who have driven me almost out of business with only a fraction of my skillset or vision. You buy a couple of D700's, couple of lenses and an sb-900 and all you need then is sucessful marketing. My main rival is friendly enough, we call each other up about once a month. I told him last time that he'd taken most of my business, this is what he said: 'I don't know why Beni, I truly believe that you are the top Jewish wedding photographer in the UK today and admit it freely to people, I guess people are only interested in cheap these days..'

Guy here in Jerusalem, one of the top in the market, even about to start selling courses in wedding photography. This guy is a joke, awful lighting, awful composition, uses a 28mm focal length for full length portraits close up (horrible to see), etc. But if you have the equipment do the job for you and sucessful marketing you can do it. You just couldn't do that 10 years ago but now big studios are going bust due to the connection between incredible technology and a 'good enough' mindset among those paying. BTW I don't work at all here in Jerusalem so it's not sour grapes, I'm a UK wedding shooter.


That's very true and for 2 main reasons. First, I always say that 'a poor photograph well marketed will always outsell a good photograph poorly marketed.' This applies to all of us. That's why learning marketing is so important when you do this as a business. It's not uncommon at all to see fine photographers make a very poor living. Similarly, there's a lot of excellent products out there, books, portfolios, etc. that are fantastic and yet are not selling very well, if they are selling at all.

Making the best product possible is not what generates sales. Marketing is what generates sales. And for most photographers, marketing is basically saying: "Here it is. I have this available and it is great." Hoping to sell something with this approach is not only delusional, it is plain ridiculous.

Second, today just about anyone, as Ben points out accurately, with a DSLR, a couple of flash heads, and a computer can do what only professionals could do in film days. Getting high quality portraits and wedding photos was hard with film. Getting a white dress to be white in print was a chalenge. Getting soft contrast was difficult. Getting nice skin tones was difficult. Tutorials were hard to come by, if they were available at all. All this is a lot easier with digital. The bar has been raised significantly, and those who insist on approaching the portrait business the way they did with film are either dead or dying.

What this all means is that the only way to truly stand out today and make a good living is by having a unique style and vision and marketing it adequately. This is not something you can buy at the store or get through software. Instead, you have to work for it. That's why so few people have it, and that's why those who do and can market it effectively have little competition. But if what you do is buy the most expensive gear out there and hope that's going to make the difference, you'll just be out of that much money because anyone can buy the same gear!
 

Alain Briot

pro member
The thing with marketing is that it can't be improvised. It's gotta be done right. Attempts to fix a marketing program after the product has been launched are as ineffective as trying to fix the rocket booster seal on the space shuttle after takeoff. The disaster is inevitable. Your fate is sealed on takoff!
 
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