Canon EOS 5D camera rumors
There are a couple rumors floating around this morning about a new Canon dSLR, the 5D. Canon’s model numbering is reversed from most manufacturers–lower numbers signify higher-end models, so this would be a model above the current Canon 20D but below the 1D series.
The spec sheet that I’ve seen suggests that it’s a full-frame camera that takes 12.8 MP images at 3 FPS. It looks like a cross between the 20D (same AF and metering system) and the original 1DS (same sensor size and similar resolution). The rumors put the price around EUR 3500, which usually ends up meaning that B&H will be selling it for between $3000 and $3500. That’s a fantastic price for a full-frame camera, but personally, I’d probably rather buy the 1D mk II–it’s basically the same price, it has a slightly smaller sensor and slightly lower resolution, but it has 2.5x the frame rate, an amazingly fast SD interface, and it’s built like a tank.
So is this a rumor or yet another leak on Canon’s part? Generally, new Canon cameras don’t leak until a day or two before the official announcement, so we should know what they’re up to by the end of the week.
Update: According to TechWhack, the 5D will be announced on August 26th. They say that it can buffer *60* JPEG frames or 17 RAW frames. At 3 FPS, that’s 20 seconds of shooting in JPEG. If I was in the market for a new camera (which I probably would be, if I wasn’t also in the market for a new PowerBook and new phone), I’d probably at least look at the 5D, especially if they manage to get the high-ISO noise even lower this time around. The frame rate is kind of slow, but the massive buffer makes me feel a lot better about the camera.
Update: Canon has announced it. See my newer Canon 5D page for details.
Still Flickring
I’ve been dribbling pictures from my laptop to my Flickr account for days now, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve made a dent in the backlog. I just posted pictures from Sophie’s first birthday. She’s almost 2½ now; the pictures have been sitting on my laptop unsorted for almost 18 months. Every time I burn through another batch of ancient pictures I feel even better about Flickr.
I’m making progress on my PictureSync problems. Apparently the reason that it wouldn’t save my Flickr password as a conflict with a version of PictureSync that I tried out last October. There was some weird remnant from the old PictureSync still sitting in my keychain that I couldn’t figure out how to delete, so I renamed my Flickr account in PictureSync from ‘Flickr’ to ‘Flickr (Scott)’, and now everything works. There are still a couple weird AppleScript bugs that pop up from time to time, but it’s usable now. I’ll probably send the shareware payment off tomorrow and hope that the remaining bugs will be fixed soon.
I’ve also been playing with 1001, an OS X interface to Flickr from the author of ecto, my favorite blog editor. I set it up on my wife’s Mac mini so she can see the pictures that I put on Flickr automatically. I also installed 1001’s Flickr screensaver on her Mac–it’s kind of cool to see pictures that I posted a half-hour ago show up on her screen all on their own. Once I have a few more pictures up, I’ll start pushing Flickr on random family members; it seems like the perfect way to share family pictures in our increasingly widely distributed family.
In fact, the whole social-networking aspect of Flickr has taken me by surprise. I’ve already had a couple old friends pop up out of the blue. There’s a lot more interconnection in Flickr contacts then I would have expected. It’s not six degrees of separation: it’s two or three degrees at most.
Weird example–1001’s home page has a few example pictures, and the last one looked kind of familiar to me. I haven’t seen the picture before, but the guy on the left looks a lot like Boris Mann; Boris and I have been swapping comments on each other’s blogs for quite a while now. A bit of searching and I found the original picture of Boris and Roland Tanglao. Even though I’ve never actually met Boris, I’ve met at least three or four of the people on his Flickr contacts list and I read the blogs of several others. I picked a few other people on his contact list and looked at their contact lists, and I kept finding more people I knew. I’m not sure if this is all that useful, but it’s certainly interesting, and it’s given me a chance to see a lot of fascinating pictures.
It makes me want to go out and shoot something interesting. Over the past year, probably 95% of my photography has been pictures of family and friends; they’re important to have, but they aren’t very exciting. Unfortunately, they’ve been all that I’ve had time to take recently. Now that I’ve started clearing up the old backlog, maybe I’ll have time to take more pictures for the fun of it, not just because we need pictures from some random family gathering.
Flickr
My poor laptop’s hard drive has been filling up with unprocessed photos again, so I took a couple hours this morning to organize things and offload them to my home fileserver. I’ve never been all that happy with my web-based photo gallery, but I haven’t been willing to spend the week or two that it’d take to write something better, and I haven’t found an open-source gallery program that works any better for me then what I have now.
File does not exist: .
So, I decided to give Flickr another try. Part of this was motivated by the Typo’s Flickr sidebar plugin–it’s the closest thing I can get to photo gallery/blog integration, and that’s something that’s been on my to-do list for around two years.
File does not exist: .
Since I use iView Media Pro for organizing my photos, I wanted to find something that could automate the process of getting pictures from iView into Flickr. A bit of searching found PictureSync, which isn’t perfect, but it works well enough for now. I can select a block of pictures in iView and drag them to PictureSync’s icon, and it will convert them to sRGB, scale them down, extract metadata from iView to stuff into Flickr tags, and then upload the whole batch. Unfortunately, it seems to have keychain issues that force me to re-create my Flickr upload settings every time I run it, and it’s not all that great at extracting metadata from iView’s “people” field. Still, it’s easier to use PictureSync and Flickr then it was to copy files to my server and re-run my make-album script, and that’s good enough for me.
File does not exist: .
So, I paid Flickr $25 to upgrade my account to “pro” status, which ups my upload limit from 20 MB to 2 GB and started uploading blocks of pictures. It’s going kind of slowly (550 MHz G4s aren’t all that great at resizing multi-megabyte images), but there’s no way around that for now. Eventually, I’ll probably write a Ruby upload script to work around the problems with PictureSync, and then I’ll be able to do uploads from a faster Linux box, but I’m pretty happy with what I have for now. It’s good enough.
File does not exist: .
In celebration of getting out of the photo hosting business, here are a few random pictures. First, Sophie looking cute, then my brother and his youngest son, my family watching a walrus at the zoo, and a mountain biker in Whistler.
Capture One LE 3.7 drops 20-photo batch limitation
I just received a message from Phase One about a new version of their Capture One RAW-image processing software. Hidden in the release notes is this little gem:
The batch queue limitation of 20 images have been removed from LE.
The last time I tried Capture One, I loved the output, but the 20-file limitation made it worthless for me, and the price jump to go from the $99 LE version to the $499 Pro version is just too big for me to justify. So, I didn’t buy it. I’m going to re-consider it now that the LE version is actually useful.
Action Panoramas
The Luminous Landscape has a feature up by Doug Brown of torontowide.com showing some of the less obvious things that you can do with multi-shot digital panoramas. I tend to read The Luminous Landscape once or so per week; the primary author has some interesting opinions on camera gear, but I’m not a big fan of most of his images.
The panorama article is an entirely different kettle of fish. I’m in awe of most of the shots. Somehow he’s managed to create panoramic action shots using an ancient Olympus E10. The framing and lighting are great, and the panoramic format gives everything a very different feel then most journalistic shots of similar topics. It just goes to show that the photographer matters a lot more then the tools he uses.
This leaves me itching to go shoot panoramas. I guess I need to go look for OS X panorama stitchers–the last time I looked, it was a lot easier to stitch photos in Windows then on the Mac.
Fire at B&H
By general consensus among photographers, B&H Photo and Video is one of the best places to order camera gear. They’re cheap, honest, and fast, and they carry everything. According to the EOS mailing list, they just suffered a big warehouse fire. A local station has details.
ProLab quits the film business
ProLab, Seattle’s second-largest pro film lab is closing their film processing and printing business. According to the Seattle P-I, the shift to digital has gutted not only their film processing, but also the demand for custom prints. Apparently people have noticed that a $2 8x10 from Costco with Dry Creek Photo’s profiles is pretty much the same as a $10 8x10 from a pro lab. With film, you’re pretty guaranteed that cheap places like Costco will scratch your film, screw up processing it, and leave it coated with gunk, but with digital that’s irrelevant.
So where does this leave the pro labs? For ProLab at least, they’re sticking with larger-format printing for advertising displays. Both ProLab and Ivey have been concentrating on this market for years, and it’ll probably serve them well for years to come, while traditional film printing fades into memory.
Camera wishlist
Since all of the big Photokina camera announcements seem to be out (Canon 1Ds, Nikon D2X, Fuji S3, and a couple thousand point-and-shoots), I figure it’s time for me to post my list of what I’d like to see the camera industry provide. I’ve been thinking about most of these for years. In that time, I’ve seen new cameras come and go, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of real innovation, particularly in the DSLR space, where all of the manufacturer’s effort has been focused on image size and speed.
None of these ideas are mind-bogglingly fantastic; some of them are admittedly a bit marginal. Some of them may well be bad ideas–I’d be amazed if at least some of these haven’t been tried out in the labs and found wanting. I haven’t seen any of these discussed widely online, though, so I figured I should probably share them.
In-body multiflash support.
I’d like to see in-body multiflash support. Canon and Nikon’s high-end flash systems support master/slave operation, with support for multiple flash units. Once unit goes onto the camera itself, and the others can be set up anywhere nearby, as long as they have a good view of the on-camera flash. It’s a nice concept, but it’s never worked very well for me in practice. Part of the problem is that you need multiple $300 flashes to make it work.
What I’d like to see is support for using the camera’s built-in flash as the master. You could control the flash system using the camera’s LCD instead of the small nasty LCD controls on the flashes. The big problem would be the angle of coverage of the built-in flash, but there are some easy fixes for that, too.
None of Canon’s higher-end bodies have ever included a flash, largely because pros don’t have much use for small flashes, but partially because pop-up flashes aren’t very rugged and they’re hard to weather seal. If you’re just planning on using the built-in flash as a multiflash controller, then you can get around all of this. Just make it IR-only, don’t include a pop up, and make the entire top of the prism hump IR-transparent. Just shoot the flash straight up. Since there are no moving parts, it’s easy to seal and fairly rugged. Since it has 360° coverage, it should work great indoors. And since it’s IR, it won’t interfere with your other lighting.
Bluetooth
I like Bluetooth–I have a Bluetooth phone, a headset, a GPS receiver, and a USB Bluetooth dongle for my Mac. It works great as a low-bandwidth, low-power communications mechanism. I’d love to see it on a camera.
What it’s not:
- a way to download pictures. It’s way too slow. It makes USB 1 look dangerously fast.
What is is:
- A wireless way to use GPSes with the camera. Nikon supports serial GPS units, but then you’re suffering from dangling wires. With a bluetooth GPS, it’d be easy to annotate each frame with the location that it was shot.
- An alternative to on-camera microphones for voice annotation. Better weather sealing on the camera.
- A remote-control system. You could set exposure and trigger the shutter wirelessly from a laptop, PDA, or even phone.
- An improved system for multiflash systems. Instead of using optical signals, the body could talk to the flashes using Bluetooth. This would let the body query the flashes directly, one at a time, allow a lot more flexibility, and cut down on the need to have a line of sight between the master flash and each slave.
Of course, you could use nearly any cheap, low-power wireless standard for any of these. Bluetooth has the advantage of being available on the market today and being fairly easy to work with.
Floating-point image formats
Dynamic range is the last big hurdle facing digital photography. Traditional film media can handle a much wider range of light and dark then digital image sensors. Black and white film is traditionally viewed as recording 10 stops of contrast; color negative film is around 7 stops. Color slides and digital cameras are usually closer to 4 or 5 stops of usable contrast. The eye, unaided, is good for well over a dozen stops.
There are two sides to this problem. First, current imaging chips aren’t very good at handling especially bright light, and they tend to clip the brightest parts of the image off. The Nikon D2X and the Fuji S3 both have technologies designed to combat this.
However, even with an ideal sensor, current cameras are limited to 7 or 8 stops, simply because they use 8-bit JPEGs to store their images. Unless you’re willing to use RAW mode on the camera and spend a couple minutes tweaking each image and then dump it into Photoshop in 48-bit color, eating 30–80 MB per image, you aren’t going to go beyond 8 stops.
The pain doesn’t stop once you get the image into Photoshop, though. The problem is that the normal representation for color images in cameras and PCs uses one fixed-size integer per color. Typically, you have either 8 or 16 bits of information per color, with 3 colors per pixel, for a total of 24 or 48 bits of data. The problem is that the information that you care about (lightness vs. darkness) isn’t spread over those bits in any sort of optimal pattern. With an 8-bit integer, the brightest stop of light uses values from 128–255, or half of the total range. The next-brightest stop goes from 64&ndash127, then 32&ndasah-63 for the third-brightest stop. After peeling off the three brightest stops, there are only 32 color levels left for the remaining 3 or 4 stops. If you do much processing at all, you’re going to find banding and noise lurking in the shadows.
There’s an easy way around this, and movie special-effects types have been using it for years. Instead of using integers for color values, use floating-point numbers. Floating point is what computers generally use whenever they’re dealing with real-world numbers, like measurements or sizes. Generally, any time you see a decimal point on a computer, you’re using floating point numbers. Internally, they’re stored in the computer in a form kind of like this: M * 2^E. The computer keeps track of M and E (technically known as the mantissa and the exponent), and the rest of it is just implied. So, for example, a 32-bit integer can represent numbers from 0 to roughly 4 billion. A 32-bit floating point number can represent numbers from -10^38–10^38, but at the cost of a bit of accuracy. Fortunately for us, the accuracy comes where we care about it the least–in the lower-order bits where sensor noise lies.
Instead of using a 32-bit float for each color, we can even cheat a bit. We could get by with a 16-bit float for each color, with an 11-bit mantissa and a 5-bit exponent; that’d be enough to cover 32 stops with nearly as much color detail as modern sensors can record for their brightest stop. Or, we could cheat and share the exponent between the three colors; done this way, we could fit three 14-bit mantissas and a 6-bit exponent (64 stops) into 48 bits, or three 9-bit mantissas and a 5-bit exponent (32 stops) into 32 bits.
The advantage of any of these formats is that they’d hold the same amount of detail in each stop, rather then bunching it all up in the brightest bit of the image. This would allow a number of small improvements and one very large one: we could finally represent colors brighter then white. Even if the screen or printer can’t reproduce a specific bright color, you can still represent it in the image.
(Apparently Apple has some support for this in Tiger, and nVidia’s newer graphics cards can do 16-bit float displays)
Built-in hard drive
I’d love to have a DSLR with a fixed 1.8 inch (iPod-sized) hard drive instead of a CF slot. You can easily get 40 GB drives in that form-factor today, with 60 GB drives on the horizon. A 40 GB drive would hold almost 3,000 1Ds mk II raw images, or over 10,000 D60-sized JPEGs. In other words, you could shoot almost any event without needing to worry about storage. Just shoot, and sort it all out later. No card swaps, no dropping them in the mud, no dust in the CF slot, just shooting.
If you drop the camera, the drive might have problems, but I’ve dropped my iPod from waist level without it croaking. What would a 3-foot drop onto a hard surface do to most camera bodies? Drive failure could be a problem, but it’s probably no less likely then shutter problems or stuck apertures, and people have dealt with those for decades: you bring more then one camera.
If you’re worried about crashes eating the images that you’ve already shot, then either keep an assistant handy to do downloads when you swap bodies, or use a wireless adapter like Nikon or Canon’s and have it download images onto a laptop while you’re shooting. The in-camera drive just turns into a big buffer and a backup for your laptop’s copy of the images. Done correctly, you’d end up with two copies of every file in fairly short order; try that with CF cards, and compare that to the dear lab please don’t eat my film this time fear that we all used to have.
That doesn’t even touch the performance factor–the specs for Toshiba’s 40 GB drive suggest that it should be able to sustain around 20 MB/sec on the outer edge of the drive. Compare that to 5 MB/sec for CF cards or 7 MB/sec for SD cards. Shooting 15 MB RAW images (1Ds mk II-sized), that’s 1.3 fps sustained. Shooting 5 MB JPEGs, that’s around 4 FPS. With a camera like Canon’s 20D, you’d be able to shoot 1,000-JPEG bursts.
Of course, it’d have a big battery hit, but I don’t see that as a big problem right now. The latest generation of pro cameras can shoot over 1,000 frames per battery, and battery technology and low-power electronics are boosting that around 50% per generation. We’ve reached the point where you can shoot 15 GB of data per battery swap, but you have to go through a dozen or so flash cards. Trading battery life for storage capacity doesn’t seem like a bad trade-off to me.
Digital Rangefinder Camera
I’d love to see a small, interchangeable-lens digital rangefinder camera. Like film rangefinders (Leica, etc), it can be tiny because it doesn’t need a SLR’s mirror. Unlike film rangefinders, you’d have the options of doing autofocus using the image chip for AF. Unlike digital point-and-shoots, you’d still be able to focus manually, even in low light, which is where rangefinders have always excelled. And unlike film rangefinders, you’d be able to see through the lens if you feel the need–think long lenses or parallax. It be a great mixture.
This would be a great market for one of the smaller manufacturers, like Olympus, Pentax, or Minolta. They really can’t compete with Canon or Nikon with DSLRs right now, but they can produce a smaller body that takes small lenses and then produce an adapter that will let them use some 35mm SLR lenses with the body. Its a niche, but it’s one that Canon and Nikon can’t move into without cannibalizing their DSLR market, so it’s probably fairly safe.
Epson has started down this road with their R-D1, but it takes Leica lenses, so it can’t do autofocus. To do this right, you’d really need a new lens mount with electronic controls and a really short focus distance; to the best of my knowledge, no current lens mount combines the two. I had hopes for the 4/3 people, but they don’t seem to be headed down this road (or anywhere else, either).
Nikon D2X?
I’m a Canon guy, but one of my Nikon friends forwarded me some specs for Nikon’s latest DSLR, the D2X. Allegedly, these were released by Nikon Denmark:
- 12.4 MP, 5 FPS, 16 shot raw buffer
- reduced-frame 6.8 MP, 8 FPS, 29 shot raw buffer
- Everything else basically similar to the current D2H.
The specs seem kind of weird to me–the buffer size and frame rates are closer to a sports camera (like the D2H) then a studio camera. The buffer sizes, particularly, seem aimed at people shooting lots of frames in a row, which isn’t the market the the DnX series has went after in the past. On the other hand, having a dedicated mode that only uses the center pixels of the image chip sounds like a decent way to please sports shooters–you get higher magnifications, which is fine when you’re using long lenses anyway, higher frame rates, and smaller files, all in one.
I’d wait to see official confirmation of this before I thought about ordering one. Of course, I’m not really in the market for a new Nikon.
Comparing the D2X to Canon’s two top-end cameras in interesting:
- The 1Ds (11 MP, 3 FPS) is slower with slightly lower resolution, but it has a much larger imaging chip which gives it better wide-angle performance and probably lower noise levels. Also, the 1Ds is rumored to be replaced soon.
- The 1D mk II (8 MP, 8 FPS) is in between the two D2X modes. It’s higher resolution then the lower-resolution mode and faster then the high-resolution mode. It also has a larger imaging chip, which gives better wide-angle performance, and a larger buffer.
Most likely, Canon will introduce a 1Ds mk II in a week or two, and Nikon’s new body will be left by the wayside again, just like the D2H was when the 1D mk II came out.
Ilford going down the tubes
PhotographyBLOG mentions that Ilford is having trouble. I was a big fan of their black and white film for a while; I loved Delta 3200, even though it was happier at 1200-1600 then at 3200. Most of my favorite B&W shots were on Delta 3200.
They’ve apparently been pushing their way into digital photography with a line of paper products, and they’re a big OEM supplier of inkjet ink, but that doesn’t change the fact that their traditional product line is dying.
I’d love to have the time and money to shoot black and white film, but I’m happy enough with the results of running digital images through Photoshop’s channel mixer, and it lets me deal with color filters after I shoot, not before. Maybe someday I’ll get a 4x5 camera and go back to B&W, but it’s not going to be this decade.