[Klaus]

Well, when looking at the current offerings "performance" is the least thing that ---> I <---- am caring about. They are all good (within the limits of a class).

Similar to choosing a Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Infinity or Lexus - it's completely irrelevant other than a matter of taste plus/minus a little (com'on - gimme your outcry here ...).

 

Same issue in the photo industry - where are the differentiators ? Where is a bold step forward ? 

 

I don't dare to state that I know the solution, of course. It is probably more in software rather than hardware.

Take for instance the Ricoh Theta - it's certainly not a "good camera" but it's an innovative solution ( see e.g. https://theta360.com/en/gallery/).  Or the Lytro <a>( https://www.lytro.com/</a> ). 

 

There'll be a "Tesla" in this arena at some stage and it will hit the old (hardware-centric) guys unprepared.

 

Just for starters ... https://www.apple.com/iphone/world-gallery/

[felix]

I don't dare to state that I know the solution, of course. It is probably more in software rather than hardware.

 

I agree for the most part, however, I think there is still some potential for innovation in the hardware department. Think of organic sensors, color-splitters or simply larger CMOS sensors (4x5" with live-view on a ~7" rear display  B)  ).

Also, a lot of current smartphone-technology (like gyroscopes, etc.) could be used more effectively in cameras. For example, I think Hasselblad's True Focus system is an interesting application of such technology. But that's probably on the borderline between hardware and software. 

 

Apple is sadly not as innovative and bold as they used to be, but they could probably still come up with something. I think, right now, the biggest threat for CaNikon (Nikon more than Canon) are companies like Samsung & Fujifilm, which run a photography business unit "just for fun". They are not as dependent on camera and lens sales and can do experiments like the X100-Series or technology show-offs like the NX1. None of these have threatened CaNikon seriously yet, but you just can't predict if and when such an experiment will really take off. 

[felix]

- double post - 

[popo]

While I don't disagree it is a challenging time for camera manufacturers, a big question here is what else could they do? I do read Thom Hogan's output regularly, not because I agree with him, but he does seem good at digging out details that might otherwise be overlooked. He would sum up what's missing possibly in two words: workflow, modular. The first is that camera companies are still thinking of their own little bit of the world and there isn't enough integration with actually doing something with the data once you got it. The second part is that given the relatively minor differences between a lot of equipment, could there be better selective reuse there?

 

I would argue that things like stereo-3D, Lytro, Foveon are still minor variations to a theme. You're still catching photos to make an image at the end. Removing focus concerns might make one part a little easier. My vision, and we're looking 10 years+ here, is that existing metrics could become meaningless by a brute force method to basically capture the whole environment around you, and use computational methods to reproduce an image from any vantage point. I forget the name of it at the moment but it was a Microsoft packaged technology you can play with (others have some similar) which can take multiple images and work out where each one was taken in a 3D scene. Imagine a future world where you might take a high resolution 360 degree video camera to a location. Move around a little bit and as you do so you can reconstruct the whole scene in 3D. Then within reason, you could walk around that scene and take a virtual shot from wherever you want. Imagine if this technology could be reduced into a smartphone level form factor...

[JJ_SO]

@popo, these are "Ironman" phantasms, throwing a smartphone somewhere and then reconstruct the whole scene including traces of gunpowder. At a certain point we're making ourselves meaningless, when OSs start to chat with each other.  Actually, we do have enough problems to solve inour world without the need of documenting them in 3D and accessible ineach magnification at each point, oh, and of course, X-rayed, too.

 

I would not say a Foveon is a minor variation and I think you don't have any experience with that kind of sensor. But I understand people seeing Foveons only as minor vraiation because I did the same before I made my first pictures with them. To me, they are innovative - more MP, bigger size but business as usual Bayer pattern are no innovation. Sorry Felix, a 4×5" sensor would deliver at 5 µm pixelpitch: 20320 × 25400 = 516.128 MP, so something between 1.5 and 2 GB data - per picture. Looks like eceryday purpose, doesn't it?

 

Innovation is not "more", "higher", "bigger" - that's evolution. Innovation is doing things totally different. Of course, one can discuss a lot if touchscreens are innovation to buttons. I think they are. I can imagine of some improvements, most of them are no innovations.

 

• For cameras with mirrors and indirect AF module I like to see calibration of each lens automatically and at certain distances and various zoom positions.
  
• DoF via focusstacking in camera, just like articfiially increasing the physical pixel count.
  
• clock calibration, when there's GPS inside
  
• camera-bottom in shape of Arca-Swiss profile
  
• Cameratype with squarish sensor proportion - we're cropping anyway
  
• LiveView to a tablet or smartphone with better HR screen without a big hardware fuss or crappy remote software. See PhaseOne.
  
• Exchangeable sensors: High ISO, High resolution, Monochrome. See PhaseOne
  

I just see no way to make that happen. Nikon i.e. is not able to change front- and rear caps - simple things keep falling off, slipping out of fingers. If they are not careful enough for details, they just want to sail the same river on and on.

 

Someone talked about Apple. I think they are an interesting example when a company looses heart and brain for inovations, Stepping into ordinary IT business is painful for users used to get a couple of pleasant surprises each year.

[Klaus]

The problem with Apple is that they got way too much money. Even if they don't want to, this will force them into innovation. The top management is obviously simply enjoying their own (perceived) awesomeness. But they got a zillion of engineers and I doubt that they are all bored by just hanging around. They hired several "camera" engineers back in 2013. They will produce an output.

 

e.g.  

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-ap...ts-camera/

 

I am pretty sure that we'll also see something about bokeh/shallow DoF soon (just a mild variation of the focus stacking JoJu mentioned) or advanced image auto correction based on a series of images (not just increasing the total resolution but the local one).  etc. pp.

[popo]

I haven't seen Ironman so don't get the reference, but basically most things can be solved by a brute force method. Capture as much data as you can, then pick out the bits you really want. I was thinking of keeping within the visible spectrum here. There would of course still be physical limits. I'm not expecting a movie style "enhance that" and be able to pick off someone's fingerprint on a glass via a reflection off some other surface!

On that note, I would see value in some radical sensor which captures spectra at each detector. To be fair, this is probably overkill for "normal" photography, but it would have massive uses in science. The nearest to that I've seen is a sensor which expands the bayer concept, and you have a colour filter array with lots more passbands, at the cost of overall spatial resolution.

I do see the possible advantages of Foveon type sensors, but they aren't keeping up with the bayer behemoth. Sigma were too late to the party. The Merrill era came too late by which point they lost most of their potential advantage over bayer sensors. I have long disliked the bayer sensor concept as a fair chunck of what I do doesn't play well with the colour sampling assumptions involved. Going back to my 1st point, the massive increases in MP count have somewhat negated the need for Foveon, by providing higher spatial sampling rates. Of course, an equivalent output pixel Foveon would still have the advantage, but development of it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. You have to take off the general photography hat, and think of this as sampled data manipulation. Increasing MP counts far beyond what we have right now helps a lot in that respect. I would also have to add not every pixel needs to look perfect all the time and there is some tradeoff to be made there.

I think we are closer to moving towards computational photography. That is, get data by whatever sources available and work out the image from that. Didn't someone make a smartphone with two or more sensors in it for example? I've even wondered if something like interferometry might be a future development to increase visible imaging potential in smaller form factors. I'm not holding my breath for consumer level aperture synthesis to be available any time soon.

[Guest]

I agree with Thom Hogan's assessment of things. Phones have made it stupidly easy to take photos and share them. I've seen pro photographers post shots on social media of the back screen of their DSLR -- taken with a phone camera, because it's too slow/impossible to get it directly from the camera.

 

We can talk about all these technical bits, but it isn't me or anyone posting here who is part of the fiscal demise of cameras.

 

I'm convinced that the first person who implements a fully open developer kit will come up with something neither we nor the camera producers can conceive. Apple won more customers because of third-party apps (free or not) than because of their own software. (Sony's "Play Memories" or whatever it is does not qualify as being fully open. They heavily restrict what you can and can not change. I believe Samsung uses an Android app in some cameras too?)

[JJ_SO]

I haven't seen Ironman so don't get the reference, but basically most things can be solved by a brute force method. Capture as much data as you can, then pick out the bits you really want. I was thinking of keeping within the visible spectrum here. There would of course still be physical limits. I'm not expecting a movie style "enhance that" and be able to pick off someone's fingerprint on a glass via a reflection off some other surface!

 
Well, what would you expect then? Where are the processors and which kind of sensors (talking of a unit with glass and sensor grid) to grab this brute force stuff? Reading your text I start asking myself if a squirrel would take a whole forest in his mouth, just because it expects to find some nuts or seeds in this collection. Brute force is what people do if we're not smart enough to hack a password or to compromise a server. I don't think, my way in photography will become a hyper-collecting individual with no time to select what matters to me. Can't see the advantages.
 

I do see the possible advantages of Foveon type sensors, but they aren't keeping up with the bayer behemoth. Sigma were too late to the party. The Merrill era came too late by which point they lost most of their potential advantage over bayer sensors.

It depends what you consider "advantage". Regarding high ISO, you're right. Regarding high resolution, I see the Foveon 16MP beating the D810 36 MP, switched to DX, by a remarkable margin. If it comes to details and contrast, to texture and clarity, the Foveon sensor appears to be superior - but I want to run a couple of comparisons for my own comprehension of what's going on. If it comes to contrast range, things become difficult to compare. The Sigma software has one slider others don't have and within limits it does a bit of magic. But then, the whole software package is for people who dare to suffer...   
 

I think we are closer to moving towards computational photography. That is, get data by whatever sources available and work out the image from that. Didn't someone make a smartphone with two or more sensors in it for example? I've even wondered if something like interferometry might be a future development to increase visible imaging potential in smaller form factors. I'm not holding my breath for consumer level aperture synthesis to be available any time soon.

"Computational phtography" I did years before when I was rendering scenes, models and textures designed in CAD. Do you wanna create artificial images? I don't, anymore. I'd rather learn how to paint than how to create synthetic languages, but maybe I do have a total wrong imagination of what you wrote about.

[popo]

Well, what would you expect then? Where are the processors and which kind of sensors (talking of a unit with glass and sensor grid) to grab this brute force stuff? Reading your text I start asking myself if a squirrel would take a whole forest in his mouth, just because it expects to find some nuts or seeds in this collection. Brute force is what people do if we're not smart enough to hack a password or to compromise a server. I don't think, my way in photography will become a hyper-collecting individual with no time to select what matters to me. Can't see the advantages.

 

I look at it differently. Maybe brute force wasn't the best description. Basically I'm saying if the cost of doing something becomes low enough, why limit yourself? We might be on the verge of that anyway. Look at 4k video. That's roughly 8MP stills. How long ago were digital cameras outputting 8MP? Not that long ago. Within the limits of video capture, you could use that and not have to worry about getting the optimal moment again.

 

Alternatively, have you ever taken a shot, and though, if only I moved left a little bit? If in doubt, get more data than you need. It is easier to bin what you don't need, than to make up what's missing. You might argue get it right in the first place, which is essentially what we try to do now. But show me anyone who gets 100% 1st time keeper rate. Doesn't exist. Technology will get us ever closer to that.

 

It depends what you consider "advantage". Regarding high ISO, you're right. Regarding high resolution, I see the Foveon 16MP beating the D810 36 MP, switched to DX, by a remarkable margin. If it comes to details and contrast, to texture and clarity, the Foveon sensor appears to be superior - but I want to run a couple of comparisons for my own comprehension of what's going on. If it comes to contrast range, things become difficult to compare. The Sigma software has one slider others don't have and within limits it does a bit of magic. But then, the whole software package is for people who dare to suffer...

I admit I've not kept up to date, but take the 15MP sensor of the SD1. Note I'm counting MP as non-upscaled output pixels. I recognise that each of those has their own RGB data. This is good. I want this. If you were to compare it against a 15MP bayer sensor output, I would expect the Foveon to be superior when pixel peeping.

 

Take the worst case, say you have a subject area that is really strong in blue, but no red or green. The Foveon still outputs 15MP of useful data. The bayer sensor would only sample 25% significantly, or be effectively a bit under 4MP. Turning it the other way, we'd need a 60MP bayer sensor to equal it in that case.

 

In practice, we don't often shoot pure colours that only exist in one colour channel, so the benefit is less than that, but still there. It will vary depending on the colour mix. Typical APS-C size sensors at around 24MP are probably close to the real world break even point. Using the full 36MP of the D8xx, or the 50MP of the 5Ds, would probably beat it in real world situations.

 

The original SD1 everyone wanted, but then died laughing at the asking price. The Merrill version was affordable, but came too late and the Foveon buzz had gone by then. Maybe one of the fixed lens cameras still makes some sense, but I've never been a person to use them. If Sigma made a SD1 with EF mount, I'd probably still buy one to play with.

 

"Computational phtography" I did years before when I was rendering scenes, models and textures designed in CAD. Do you wanna create artificial images? I don't, anymore. I'd rather learn how to paint than how to create synthetic languages, but maybe I do have a total wrong imagination of what you wrote about.

 

That's not what I'm suggesting at all. You still capture (data for) photos, but perhaps less directly and in a manner that requires more processing to get something we recognise.

 

Lytro could be an example of this. It is gathering data that wont look recognisable until you calculate it what the light is doing, and form it into an image.

 

As another example closer to what I hope to see, look up the Very Large Telescope. This array can be used as separate telescopes, but also combined to increase resolving ability. Now, I'm not suggesting we all need a telescope array to make images, but imagine if this could be reduced in size and computational cost. Some day in the future you might end up with an array of camera sensors on the back of a smart phone, and able to produce images comparable to something much bigger.