Photonic Shunkan

One of the oddities produced by the dawn of the digital photography era is the multi-purpose professional camera. A typical example is the Canon 5D series (current iteration = 5D Mark IV). It can be used for a bit of sport/wildlife/action, portraiture, weddings, travel, street etc. It is a jack of all trades. In future, the multi-purpose consumer level camera will be some sort of small format mirrorless-EVF (ML-EVF) camera (eg M4/3, APS-C, 35mm small format). It will be interesting to see if it continues to remain acceptable for professionals to shoot with such devices across multiple scenarios. Such multi-purpose cameras are becoming increasingly capable eg high resolution, fast frame rate, good ergonomics/portability. They will remain popular and retain some sort of place in the market. The rise to dominance of the multi-purpose professional camera can be put down to the loss of camera differentiation caused by the mass extinction of speciality camera firms from the apocalyptic e...

A follow-up to this entry: Proof that the Larger the Camera Format, the Shallower the Depth of Field We previously showed that Canon was correct to state that increasing format size reduces DOF Left: 35mm format Right: APS-C format Image: Canon Japan I thought of the following potential additional experimental setup. It is based on the fact that it makes it much easier when you compare much smaller formats with formats much larger. The problem is that I don't own or have access to a Pentax Q10 camera with the 15-45mm f/2.8 lens. The others I do have access to. I even looked to see how much a Q10 with this lens would cost on eBay...but it seems absurd to spend money on a camera just to prove that our current scientific understanding of optics is correct. Here is the setup: 1. Pentax Q10 camera ( 5.53× crop factor ) with 06 Telephoto Zoom 15-45mm f/2.8 lens (35mmF equivalent of an 83-249mm lens) set at 35mm focal length (35mmF equivalent of 193.5mm focal length) 2. A...

It used to be that 35mm format (which we will call 135F) was a low-resolution mass consumer format. In the film era, 35mm was never touted as being an earth-shattering large "full frame" format as calling a disposable camera that would have sounded ridiculous. Today 135F is gradually becoming a commonplace mass-consumer product again It was considered acceptable for professional use in the film age only for field use in reportage, sports, and wildlife photography. That said, towards the end of the film age, the grain of film became finer, resulting in better quality images from smaller formats. The progressive evolution of 135F into a higher resolution image format has continued into the digital age. Amongst digital formats, at one point in history, it used to be the largest format utilised in civilian photography, and for that reason, the advertising moniker from around 2002 touting it as "full frame" became stuck in popular usage, despite the emergen...

At the moment, phone companies tout the imaging capabilities of their phone cameras and try to outdo each other. It is clear that for a proportion of buyers, image quality matters and is a draw factor towards increased sales. The trend is towards ever higher resolution phone camera sensors and some people may wonder if the upwards trend will continue to infinity and beyond. Yet there is another component of the smart phone whose resolution is well behind digital resolutions achieved back in the 1980s and which shows no trend towards improvement, and that is with audio sound quality. In the 1980s, Sony and Phillips put together a file protocol known as the Red Book Protocol achieving 16-bit Linear PCM (pulse-code modulation) sampled at 44.1 kHz. Today, ultra high resolution PCM protocols go up to 32-bits and 768kHz sampling. The Sony CDP-101 released in 1982 used an audio file protocol with a much higher resolution than the majority of modern listeners utilise today when listenin...

The latest news is that a Canon ambassador has been found talking about an upcoming camera that can shoot at 30fps: https://www.canonrumors.com/a-new-canon-dslr-seems-to-be-getting-teased-on-social-media-by-a-canon-ambassador/ People are commenting that the camera must be designed to shoot at 30fps in the mirror up position, which is totally absurd. That is like saying that the mirror is a redundant piece of equipment that needs to be locked up and forced to get out of the way for the camera to function properly. It is much more likely that the 1DX Mark II successor will have no mechanical reflex mirror but that it will instead have a pellicle mirror. That way, the mirror does not need to be moved out of the way for it to function and contributes positively to the accuracy of the autofocus. Some may wonder if Canon has found a way to get the reflex mirror to move fast enough to achieve a 30fps frame rate, but that is unlikely. At some point, Canon have NO CHOICE but to elim...

It is a sad fact that today some algorithm ensures the populist proliferation of gross misinformation on the internet. In an age of misinformation being spread like wildfire over the internet, readers are asked to critically evaluate the information they have been presented with: 1. Is the source of information credible? 2. Is it mechanistically plausible (in photography, on the basis of the science of optics)? 3. If objections have been raised, have these objections been adequately dealt with? Sadly, the chances are that the internet will ignore credible sources of information along with science and unquestioningly listen to Suckerberg-type algorithm driven popularisations of egregious falsehoods instead. But despite the chances that all reasoned arguments and scientifically credible evidence will be ignored, proof that the claims made in this YouTube segment are utter nonsense will be shown to the rare thinkers amongst readers: This flies in the face of what Canon st...

This is a bold prediction, but Canon (and Nikon) will reintroduce the pellicle mirror into their DSLR line camera systems some time within the next 4-8 years. The last pellicle mirror camera released by Canon was the EOS-1N RS introduced in 1995 and only discontinued in 2001: A semi-translucent pellicle mirror replaces a moving reflex mirror that lifts up to capture the image. The key prediction being made here today is that the pellicle mirror will return to a 1D equivalent camera some time in the next 4-8 years. Nikon, in the more distant past, has also had pellicle mirror film cameras like the Nikon F2H from 1976, and they too will introduce a pellicle mirror digital single-lens translucent mirror (DSLT) camera with an electronic viewfinder (EVF) replacing an optical viewfinder. Canon tends to be more conservative than Nikon but in this instance Canon appears to own recent patents relevant to pellicle mirror cameras, whereas no DSLT relevant Nikon patents have be...