Photonic Shunkan

Man is the measure of all things, so said the Greek philosopher, Protagoras. At least when we compare the size of animals we compare them with ourselves to get a sense of their relative scale. The size of an average adult becomes the standard size reference point. The comparative size of a human = 1. What about cameras? A commonly used standard comparative reference point is the 35mm format camera after it was popularised by the Leica I released in 1925. The odd thing about this comparison is that some people refer to a 35mm format camera as being "full frame". The reason for this is that its comparative size is set at relative size = 1. This makes it a 100% sized camera and hence "full frame". This is like saying that a human being is a full frame animal because its comparative size is set at 1, making it a 100% sized creature. Large circle: 640mm diameter of the LSST space telescope's digital sensor Civilian digital camera sensor formats shown for c...

It looks like my predictions are off as Canon has announced the development of the 1DX Mark III: https://photonicshunkan.blogspot.com/2019/06/prediction-canon-will-put-pellicle.html https://photonicshunkan.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-canon-1dx-ii-successor-will-be.html That's OK—since I originally predicted that the move to a pellicle mirror would take another product cycle after the 1DX Mark III. You have to make predictions bold even when you know there is always going to be a chance of being wrong. I wrote: "I thought it would take another product cycle of the 1D line for this to happen given Canon's conservatism, hence my prediction that it will take another 4-8 years, but it may be happening sooner than thought. It might even materialise before the 2020 Olympics." There were false rumours about the Mark III having an extraordinarily fast frame rate, which were little more than rumours, and which made me hope that Canon would ditch its conservatism and mo...