Alright, I got a chance to watch this earlier today, but not to blog it until now. This is a video made by the fine folk at Camera Technica of the aperture on a Canon 18-55mm doing it’s thing. There’s… not much to say beyond that. This is pure gadget porn, but man, look at how awesome it is. Watch it! Press PLAY! PRESS PLAY!
› archive for ‘Technobabble’
Nikon Patents DSLR/Projector Combo in Japan
So, you know what’s cooler than a point-and-shoot with an integral projector. A DSLR with an integral projector. And apparently, Nikon agrees, since it’s filed a patent for exactly that. Now, we want to say that again, a patent for it. That doesn’t mean that this is coming anytime soon, or that we’ll ever see it. If we had a cookie for every awesome patent we’ve seen Canon file but not use so far, well, we could give a certain popular kid’s show icon a glimpse of nirvana.
That said, the idea looks cool, and if we’re reading that little schematic there right, it looks like the projector would bounce the image from up inside the prism back out through the lens. That sounds awesome.
Anyway, you can read the whole thing online if you jump through some crazy hoops, but we’ll let the post over at Engadget explain how to do that, since we learned it from them.
Canon Creates Monster Sensor, Largest CMOS Going
So, see that diagram there? That diagram shows the size differences between common sensor sizes and Canon’s newly announced 202mm x 205mm CMOS beast. Here’s a clue, that whole black area is the new sensor, not a frame. That red area is Phase One’s biggest medium format sensor. Seriously. Click it to see it larger, and all conveniently labeled.
This new CMOS is apparently being made from a 12″ wafer, and the final usable area still measures at about 8″ square. It’s really kind of huge. Canon is also saying it works in situations with 1/100th the light as a DSLR can operate in. Can you say ‘yowza’?
Like Canon’s other bit of silicon bragging recently, no word when or even if this’ll ever see use, more or less in what. For now, we just get to respect their mad-tinkering ways. Go go engineers!
It's The Big One, Obviously.
Canon Creates 120 Megapixel APS-H Sensor
Well, Canon has announced an APS-H (their 1.3x crop sensor used in the 1D series) with a jaw-dropping 120 megapixels. And, if that wasn’t showing off enough, they say it can have the data pulled off it at a rate of 9.5 frames a second. Double-yowza. As for when this’ll be economically feasbile commercially, who knows, a lot of websites are saying we won’t see it in our lifetimes, but obviously Moore’s Law suggests something closer to 3 years from now before it even becomes viable commercially. But, whatever, Canon’s pulled it off now, whether they ever sell it, and that’s quite an accomplishment in its own right. Bravo, big red.
Microsoft Can Undo The Jitters
If you own any modern smartphone, and we’re guessing at least a few of you must, than you’re already familiar with accelerometers, those things in your phone that let it decide which way it’s moving and operate everything from games to the simple act of auto-rotating the screen. Well, the news is that Microsoft is developing an algorithm that reads all the accelerometer and gyroscope data from when a picture was taken and uses it to know exactly how you were moving, and can use that to fairly accurately cancel out blur. For real.
Obviously the initial implication is maybe we ca finally get better images from our cameraphones (where installing optical lens or sensor shift stabilization is difficult, to say the least), but there’s no reason so far this technology couldn’t come to affect cameras of every variety, so long as there’s room for a few accelerometers.
They’ve got a few demos of this, including the image of the cans of Coke there (click it to see the full size which cycles between before and after. And, that’s the worst demo they have. That’s as bad as it gets, and boy it gets a lot better), so, why not hop over to Engadget’s write-up on it to see more?
Roberts Offering IR Conversion, excellent pricing.
Want to take photos like this? We offer IR Conversion services...
Roberts is proud to offer IR conversion for point and shoot, APS-C, and full frame digital cameras. Why-fore would you want to convert your camera to the IR spectrum? Here’s a list (because I like lists):
- You want more dramatic black and white photos
- You want the Wood Effect
- You want to capture dreamy, fantastical colored landscapes
- You work in Law Enforcement / Forensics
- You’re involved in certain types of scientific research
- You have a specific assignment requiring the use of IR
Obviously the desire for ethereal coloring is the best reason for dropping a few bills on the conversion, now there are two types of conversion -
1.) 715nm: Suitable for B&W and low saturation color images. Camera will be sensitive to wavelengths higher than 715nm.
2.) 665nm: Suitable for both B&W and Color. Primarily used for color due to higher color saturation (vs. 715nm). B&W images can be produced in post processing. See a chart with the differences after the jump.
You get to pick one because, well, the fine folks at Precision Camera are going to remove with surgical precision your camera’s IR filter and feed it to the crows. Ok, I don’t know about the birds, but they’re taking that thing off and replacing it with one of the correct sensitivity.
New Canon Patent Application Is Intriguing
Thanks to the eagle-eyes of some watchful (and somewhat disturbing) internet denizens, a recent Canon patent application is making the rounds today. Why, you might ask?
Well, because if everyone’s reading it right, it would allow a camera to perform pixel-level HDR calibration by firing a test shot, evaluating each pixel against some heuristic, then re-firing the shot, adjusting the EV at each pixel site to adjust for any over- or under-exposure.
That’s friggin’ cool.
For those of you new to things, HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a general term covering a lot of solutions to one common problem: digital sensors can’t record as much dynamic range as the human eye can see. If you’ve ever wondered why skies and highlights look washed out, or shadows seem too dark and lurking, that’s why. The goal of HDR in any form is to keep highlights from blowing out and still keep fine detail in shadows. Taken to an extreme, especially with a process called tone-mapping, and you can end up with photos with detail and color that the human eye physically couldn’t perceive, and that’s where the raging debate about “HDR” photos being photographs or photo illustrations or outright garbage stems from.
Aaaanyway…
Back to that patent, there might be something about being to adjust just show drastic an adjustment the camera makes when firing the second shot? Something like that. All-and-all, a very intriguing patent app, and should it ever see the light of day and materialize in a real-world device it has the potential to be a game-changer. Will that happen? Who knows? Patent apps are fuzzy things at best, and it’s anyone’s bet if they ever see actual implementation, but at least we know Canon’s engineer’s are rubbing their sexy brain-lobes over the problem, yeah?
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