Kodak Unveils 50MP CCD Image Sensor 228
i4u writes in to let us know that Kodak has announced the world's first 50 million pixel CCD image sensor for professional photography (i.e., for medium-format cameras). Engineering-grade devices of the CCD, the KAF-50100, are currently available. Kodak plans to enter volume production in Q4 2008. "At 50 megapixels, the sensor captures digital images with unprecedented resolution and detail. For instance, with a 50 megapixel camera, in an aerial photo of a field 1.5 miles [about 2.5 km] across, you could detect an object about the size of a small notebook computer (1 foot by 1 foot)." Here's CNet's Crave blog with a few more technical details.
Hasselblads? (Score:5, Informative)
H3DII-50 has had 50 megapixel backends for quite some time..?
Is it unprecedented because it's now available at a cheaper price or something?
Nice (Score:4, Informative)
Happily this sort of development drives down prices on consumer grade products over time. I wonder how this compares to scanning low iso medium format film on a drum scanner.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml [luminous-landscape.com]
Is a good example of such a comparison, though I've seen differing results with older digital cameras.
Re:Hasselblads? (Score:5, Informative)
So this news may not be the really latest news.
Re:I can't use this (Score:5, Informative)
You can't use this. I can't use this. But a real pro can. I'm just a point and shooter with a small amount of knowledge to be dangerous. 5-6 mpix is probably all I need because I don't have a discerning eye. I only want to blow stuff up to 8 x 10 once in awhile when I accidentally take a great picture (like when the airplane went right by Mt. Rainier (REALLY close) and I just happened to have a window seat. I coulda seen a climber pee in the snow on there!)
But to a real pro I could see how this would be a must have, and if it is a must have they'll pay whatever it takes to get it, and the cost will be too much for both of us. And if producing this ultimately brings down the cost of my Nikon Coolpix 5700 next time I have to buy one, that's cool with me.
Hasselblad and Film (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, Hasselblad has given up on the V system line (as the H system is a completely different design) and only the lowly 16mp back is offered with a square sensor. And its mostly as a tribute to V system diehards and possibly be discontinued soon.
That means that if a V system user want to upgrade to a new digital back, like the 50mp one, will need to dump the whole system. The lenses can be used with adaptors but then you will miss their real focal length and the autofocus and electronics of the H system. Which unfortunately goes against the philosophy of the "old" Hasselblad company where one could mix modern and old components freely. That meant that you could stick a modern lens and a digital back on a 50 year old body. Now, its pretty much "dump everything" to upgrade.
Re:Hasselblads? (Score:1, Informative)
that camera uses the exact same sensor CCD you idiot.
Re:I can't use this (Score:4, Informative)
And I wonder how many people's computers will absolutely CRY when trying to open a 50mpix tiff. My 6mpix jpegs are 2.5-3.5mb.
Here [arizona.edu] is a 24mb tiff from the Phoenix mission.
Re:I can't use this (Score:3, Informative)
Its not a Mom and Pop ccd for a $299 camerat at walmart.
Current digital backs for film cameras like I use are 20,000 a POP !
Try to take one of you 6mp pics and blow it up to a 6ft poster or art piece, youll be swimming in boxes
I still shoot film, medium format 6cmx6cm, 25 iso high silver film. I took a picture of a building in NY and the 60th story I can count rivets in the windowsill vents when I blow it up.
For high quality there is no comparison for film, currently, I would trash my darkroom in a New York minute if I could forgo the nasty chemicals and space in my house, but I cant affork 20,000 for a digital back.
HOPEFULLY this will drop the price in the even the 3-4k market....
Re:better have a steady hand (Score:1, Informative)
You're operating under a misapprehension. The picture itself can be taken in 1/1000th of a second (or less). It takes 1.4 seconds to move the image from the buffer to your storage card.
Re:better have a steady hand (Score:1, Informative)
No, this is talking about capture time, not exposure time.
Exposure time is the time you have to stay still for - the time the shutter is open.
Capture time is how long it takes to move the picture to memory.
Re:better have a steady hand (Score:2, Informative)
from cnet [cnet.com] we have:
The specs on the two cameras, however, show the lower-resolution version to be faster: 1.4 seconds per capture for the H3DII-39 over 1.1 seconds for the H3DII-50. That could simply be implementation-specific, though.
Indeed, 1.4 seconds is a very long time to not move. Only useful for objects and scenery, certainly not going to do people or wildlife.
The times refer to saving the photos, not exposing them.
Re:Note (Score:4, Informative)
Re:better have a steady hand (Score:2, Informative)
from cnet [cnet.com] we have:
The specs on the two cameras, however, show the lower-resolution version to be faster: 1.4 seconds per capture for the H3DII-39 over 1.1 seconds for the H3DII-50. That could simply be implementation-specific, though.
Indeed, 1.4 seconds is a very long time to not move. Only useful for objects and scenery, certainly not going to do people or wildlife.
I do not think that means what you think it means.
It has nothing to do with shutter speeds. You just can't shoot again until 1.4 seconds, which is how long it takes the camera to process and write the image to the card. The camera has a frame rate of about 0.7 FPS.
Re:I don't know about how many LoCs this is .... (Score:5, Informative)
You mean a telephoto lens?
I have a Sigma 10-20mm lens that is a zoom lens that is from crazy-wide to very-wide, and doesn't get to a "normal" focal length. Perhaps you mean something like a 500mm lens, which doesn't zoom?
Focal length comparison, from 10 to 500mm on a 1.5x crop sensor here [flickr.com]
Consumer grade medium format (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, ... today? [bhphotovideo.com]
these exist! (Score:5, Informative)
They are called scanning backs because that is precisely what they do.
And yes, the resolution is unparalleled. 50 megapixels was achieved in these, oh maybe 10 years ago. Its not uncommon today for these to generate files in excess of 1GB.
Re:better have a steady hand (Score:1, Informative)
The shutter is open from 1/8000 to a few seconds. The 1.1 or 1.4 seconds referred to in the article is the fastest time between photographs, and is dictated by the time required to to extract, process then store the information from the sensor.
Re:Note (Score:4, Informative)
Billboards can be shot with the cheapest of consumer digital cameras due to the fact that they are printed at an extremely low DPI. If you were standing two feet in front of a billboard it would look absolutely horrible regardless of what it was shot with, but for people viewing them from 50 feet away it looks perfect. The only thing you need a ton of megapixels for is very large prints that can be viewed up close. An average print in a shopping mall is anywhere from five to ten feet tall and you can walk right up to it. For those you need a lot of resolution. Having said that, billboards are still probably shot with medium format due to the nature of the assignment, even the two by three inch pictures on product boxes or catalogs are shot medium format because that is what is used by commercial photographers, almost exclusively.
I've measured around 400 Megapixels equivalent (Score:5, Informative)
...in a typical medium format transparency (6x7cm) shot with a good lens (e.g. Mamiya Sekor). That's a careful assessment made by inspecting top quality drum scans. Yes, those lenses are expensive; up to $3K-4K new, but that's not just the optics - the lens integrates the leaf shutter (not focal plane, typical of consumer cameras).
For comparison, a 35mm film frame (24x36mm, iirc) carries about 15 Megapixels (there is wide consensus on this).
More here [google.ca], here [photo.net]...
Re:Hasselblads? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Note (Score:2, Informative)
The release of the D3 and the announced D700 have changed that. Full frame is now maintstream, albeit pricey ($3K). But this sensor is medium format. It is 4 inches by 5 inches, not an inch by an inch and a bit like 35mm.
So, no, it will NEVER be used in a consumer-level camera. This is for people who shoot billboard ads.
This sensor is destined for pro level studio cameras, but Sony have a 22MP sensor for Full Frame 35mm that should be in cameras announced at Photakina this year. Nikon are expected to release at 22MP D3 and Sony should have the A900 out. But they are certain to be very pricey at first. Expect the D3x to be $6500.
The 'blad will continue to be absurdly expensive but its that huge sensor size that demands the expensive lenses. The only improvement you get going to a larger sensor size on digital is that your low light performance improves. That is not an issue in the studio which is where 95% of 'blads live. Out in the field you might as well lug full frame format gear round with you. Most pros use 35mm outdoors.
Answering some other confusions in the thread: no diffraction is not an issue here. Diffraction softens focus at small apertures. It does that regardless of whether you use film or digital and regardless of your pixel resolution. The only point where pixel resolution becomes an issue is at smaller f-stops or at levels of MP we have not reached yet.
The hard limit for 35mm full frame format cameras is the wavelength of red light. If the pixels are sized 2 wavelengths of light on each side you can squeeze a maximum of 320MP on a full FX frame. That is lower than the limit set by diffraction which is 1050MP at f/1.4.
In practice current lenses are not good enough to go to 320MP. But the current pro-range Nikor lenses are good for at least 50MP and probably 100MP. My mid range ($670) 18-200 zoom delivers pixel sharp results on a 12MP DX body. So it would deliver pixel sharp results (in the center of the frame anyway) for FX format at 22MP.
Re:Note (Score:2, Informative)
"The release of the D3 and the announced D700 have changed that. Full frame is now maintstream, albeit pricey ($3K). But this sensor is medium format. It is 4 inches by 5 inches, not an inch by an inch and a bit like 35mm. "
Not to start a holy war, but the Canon 5D made full frame mainstream three years ago. It's just Nikon that have finally caught up.
Re:Note (Score:3, Informative)
Um 8 megapixels is useless without really good lenses. The crap lenses put on most consumer DSLR cameras are worthless. I regularly freak people out with a really old 3 megapixel DSLR (interpolates to 6MP) and a $3200 lens that takes better photos and produces better 8X10 prints than their new rebel XTi with it's $22.95 stock lens that it comes with.
it's ALL in the lens. Megapixels makes very little difference if your glass sucks.
Granted that Rebel XTi kicks my arse hard if you put a $3200.00 or better lens on it, but someone with a consumer digital and a high end L series lens are incredibly rare.
More Than 50MP That Meets the Eye (Score:3, Informative)
The fovea [wikipedia.org] of the human eye, the part that sees details, is approximately (in a hexagonal layout) 4000x3000 photoreceptive cells. To saturate the foveal field with data, the Nyquist rate [wikipedia.org] says that an image must deliver 8000 x 6000 dots. Which is 48MP. 50MP is enough to cover that field. It's still not quite enough to completely fool the eye, until the 50MP is in a grid that exactly matches the eye - and no two eyes are the same, even in a single person, and not regularly hexagonal, but actually a stochastic distribution in a roughly six-axial surface across the inside of an uneven sphere.
And even then, the fovea is only about 1mm, capturing a 2-degree field in the middle of vision, about double the width of your thumbnail at arm's length. These 50MP cameras only capture the amount of info that's in the central 2 degrees, though the human eye captures data (though much less per degree outside the fovea) from a visual field [wikipedia.org] with a 160 degree horizontal width and 135 degrees vertical height. Unless the image delivery can track the eye's movement to stay projected on the fovea, the image has to have foveal (over) density imagery across the entire scene for the fovea to track across.
But for images to stare at, 50MP is about the foveal (over) resolution. Further improvement is probably better off invested in image delivery technology, as we're sampling at about the limit of what we can actually see.
Re:Note (Score:5, Informative)
Well I'm sorry to break it to you, but the size of the Airy disk at f/5.6 is 7.5 microns, therefore any sensor with smaller pixels can be said to be diffraction-limited. If you want to discard the issue of color, and consider just the luminance, then the 2x2 pattern gives you a 12 micron area diameter in which case the system is diffraction-limited at f/11 and smaller. But if you do that you must be willing to admit that the system has only 3 megapixels instead of 12.
You appear to be operating under some definition of diffraction-limited other than "limited by diffraction". Also I would like to point out that 12MP on a 16x24mm sensor is 6 microns, not "less than 6 microns".
Re:Note (Score:1, Informative)
And in response Nikon's board decided that enough was enough. They had lost too much face to Canon. Which was somewhat ironic as Nikon had been leading the charge to bring out affordable DSLR models.
Since then the story has been rather different. Nikon has refreshed their entire exotic lineup (superteles, tilt-shift) and brought out 3 new Canon killer cameras in the past 8 months (D3, D300, D700) with a 4th expected very soon (D3X).
It is a rather interesting competition. Canon has vastly more resources, but they are spread out over many markets and pro-photography is not the absolute top priority for the company. Nikon has to make pro-photography their top priority because its the reason most of the consumers buy Nikon over other brands.
Canon really does not seem to have an answer so far. They have a bunch of f/1.2 lenses, but that is of questionable value in the digital age. If you want bokeh the Nikor line of Defocus Control lenses looks more interesting.
Full frame is not very interesting at the moment unless you really care about ultimate wide angle performance in the 14-18mm equivalent range and don't want to use a fisheye. Otherwise the 1.6 crop you get on the DX sensors is like a built in teleconverter. A 200mm lens becomes a 300mm exotic, sweet. I am not planning to buy a D700, it is not worth $3000 to have 12MP in the FX format. I would rather spend the additional $1,400 over the price of the D300 on a lens.
Full frame is going to be really interesting when the full frame sensors have the same pixel density of the crop sensors. A 22MP full frame camera is like having a full frame camera with a built in 11MP DX mode. They will definitely get there, but it could be another year before they are affordable.
All things being equal, its better to spend money on lenses than cameras at this point. A DSLR is obsolete in 24 months, I can still use my 25 year old Nikon lenses on my D300.
Re:I've measured around 400 Megapixels equivalent (Score:4, Informative)
You don't need that many pixels. Good quality 6-8MP digitals were considered by many to surpass film because of other characteristics (especially the lack of film grain).
Re:I've measured around 400 Megapixels equivalent (Score:3, Informative)
Wide, perhaps, but not very deep, so to speak. Anybody who believes the limit on film is around 15 megapixels has essentially no clue of what they're talking about.
A really good 35 mm lens, with the camera mounted on a tripod, carefully focused, and stopped down to maximum sharpness (typically around 2-3 stops from wide open), can resolve around 100-110 lines/mm. Since the film plane is 24x36, that works out to 2400x3600 up to 2640x3960 lines. Keep in mind, however, that this is lines, not pixels. It takes two adjacent pixels to capture a single line. IOW, you're looking at around 35-40 megapixels.
It is true that resolution tends to drop towards the corners so the real overall resolution is likely to be (slightly) lower, and even the best zooms aren't very close to that -- we're talking about a fixed focal length lens. Of course to record that you're also looking at a slow, fine-grained film like Tech Pan 2415 for B&W or Kodachrome 25, Velvia or Provia for color.
OTOH, 15 megapixels is probably a reasonable number if you're comparing to a more typical shot that's hand held, autofocused and only at the optimum f/stop if that's what the camera's programmed auto-exposure happened to choose.
Re:Not bad for $37,000.00 (Score:3, Informative)
the h3-DII50 won't be available until October (possibly later)
their competitors are coming with 65 mp digital backs.
Hasselblad is a locked down proprietary system, hasselblad cameras only connect to hasselblad backs, and vice versa.
Mamiya and Phase One are using open protocols in their cameras and backs.
btw. Expect an announcement of an even higher pixelcount back at the photokina conference. 23 of september.
Re:I've measured around 400 Megapixels equivalent (Score:3, Informative)
You are comparing area to length. Check your units.
Megapixels = area.
Frame dimensions = length.
35mm = 1.37" frame width
1.37" x 1.18in = 1.6 square inches in 7:6 format.
6"x7" = 42 square inches.
42 / 1.6 = 26.25 - suspiciously close to your number.
Re:I've measured around 400 Megapixels equivalent (Score:1, Informative)
Dude, you're comparing inches to cemtimetres. Medium format is 6x7 cm, not 6x7".