At 3:52 PM +0000 12/20/01, olympus-digest wrote:
>Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 11:41:02 +0000
>From: Roger Wesson <roger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: [OM] New Olys
>
>ClassicVW@xxxxxxx wrote:
> >
> > Here's the main paragraph of the Photo Industry Reporter article. The
> > new interchangeable-lens digital SLR *will not* use existing Olympus
> > lenses....
> >
>
>This INFURIATES me! Why on earth would it not? If you really do need
>different optical technology for digital as opposed to film use (and I
>am not sufficiently informed to know why this is. In astronomy, there
>was no need to build masses of new telescopes when CCDs began to replace
>film 10-15 years ago) you could at least use the same mount as the old
>lenses. The Nikon D1X can use Nikkor lenses made in the 50s, and this
>doesn't seem to have affected its reputation for producing high quality
>images. I've never seen a review that didn't drool over it.
>
>Is this just Olympus wanting to force us all to buy entirely new kit if
>we should want to go digital? If so, then that's the kind of thing
>that'd make me want to switch to another less cynical manufacturer (if I
>didn't have an irrational and unshakable affection for Olympus cameras).
Umm. It's not irrational. Even if it leaves our beloved lens collections
behind.
The image sensor in a digital camera is a CCD chip, and these are quite a bit
smaller than the 36x24 mm of a 35-mm frame. If one tried to make a CCD that
large, it would be *very* expensive. (They do exist, are used in astronomy,
and have totally displaced film.) The CCDs of reasonable cost are something
like 10x15 mm, so the "normal" lens focal length for this will be something
like 20 mm, leading to a far smaller lens and thus camera.
Especially if it convinces us to leave those lenses behind. One problem with
good cameras is that they last far too long. For instance, those Zuiks will
happily use lenses thirty years old! We need to find a way to convince people
to replace their cameras every three years, for the health of the economy.
More seriously, the population will really like the idea of a smaller camera
with 35-mm SLR performance, and it will surely happen. And it doesn't follow
that the image plane needs to be 24x36 mm, as photographic lenses are far from
diffraction limited.
Let's take a lens with resolution of 60 lines per millimeter. Each such "line"
is in fact a pair of lines, one black, one white. There are 24*36*(2*60)^2=
12,441,600 resolution cells in such a frame. Each cell has the three colors,
so the uncompressed file (assuming 8 bits per color) is 36 Mbytes. Current
consumer digital cameras yield up to 4.1 million pixels, or 12.4/4.1= 3.0 times
as many pixels per frame.
(The high-end ($20K) professional cameras yield ~100 Mbyte picture files, three
times more, between more pixels and more bits per color.)
My Moore's Law, which holds that digital electronics performance doubles every
18 months, it will take Log2(3)*18= 28.5 months, or 2.4 years for digital
cameras to equal 35 mm film cameras at the same price that 4.1 Mpixel cameras
sell for today.
This is what has Kodak and Fuji so worried. In twenty years, film cameras will
be largely extinct, but for the adamant Zuikoholics.
Joe
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