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11-28-2009, 11:30 AM   #16
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Our crops right now can easily show skin pores and blemishes you probably wouldn't notice with your eyes, especially with a good sharp lens. As I mentioned, much of the tech stuff kind of goes over my head in these discussions. One thing I have noticed since I have switched to digital is how demanding we have become on our gear. With film, probably 90% of my shots were viewed as a 4x6 print. Sometimes I would get my better shots enlarged to 5x7 or 8x10 prints to hang on the wall. With digital, our smaller sizes are about 5x7 and a full screen view is larger than 8x10, even on a laptop. We are pixel peeping to a degree even with normal viewing. We quickly dismiss shots as soft, motion blurred, etc and click delete even though the shot initially looked ok on the cameras LCD.

I'm mentioning this because I am slowly going through the tedious task of digitizing 40 years worth of prints and slides. Many of my shots which I considered some of my better ones really look like crap scanned and viewed on the computer and today would be deleted. I know there may be some loss of IQ by the scanner, especially scanning prints but I was very disappointed with how bad they looked. Any discussion of resolution always seems to bring up the film vs. digital sensor issue. Just judging by what I'm seeing with my eyes, the IQ of digital photos seems to be much better than anything I ever did with film and I'm using the K10D, with a sensor that's somewhat outdated compared to the K20D and K7. I might add that many of my current photos are with the same 35mm FF lenses I used on my film cameras.

11-29-2009, 02:03 PM   #17
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QuoteOriginally posted by Ben_Edict Quote
Unfortunately you are off. Better materials are not a problem today. The resolution is only limited by diameter, nothing else. Ofcourse there are still inferior lenses on the market, which do not perform to the theoretical limits, but that's rarely a problem of materials, but one of manufacturing or lens design (rought surfaces, due to poor polishing, bad centering etc.)

Resolution is limited by the maximum diameter of the exit pupil of the lens. Usually you would talk about resolving power, which is:

RP = 1/1.22 Lambda K; where Lambda is the wavelength of light and K the relative aperture

You can see from this formula immediately, that resolution increases with shorter wavelengthes (bluer light) and larger apertures. This is the determining factor.

Ben
So.. To be able to reach the insane resolutions we are imagining, you'd have to throw the lens out of the equation..

I've forgotten most of my high school physics, but maybe you'd know this.

If in the future, you could make an imaging sensor of a material that could flex/morph into a parabolic shape, would this create an effect similar to refraction? Flat equals no zoom, curve the sensor inwards to zoom in and outwards to get wide angle shots.
11-29-2009, 03:03 PM   #18
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QuoteOriginally posted by TValand Quote
So.. To be able to reach the insane resolutions we are imagining, you'd have to throw the lens out of the equation..
I've forgotten most of my high school physics, but maybe you'd know this.
If in the future, you could make an imaging sensor of a material that could flex/morph into a parabolic shape, would this create an effect similar to refraction? Flat equals no zoom, curve the sensor inwards to zoom in and outwards to get wide angle shots.

Flexing surfaces is a nice concept and could work. Indeed in some applications we already have that. "Adaptive optics" (that is the name) is already employed for mirrors in telescopes. It is used to locally adapt the surface of the mirror to counteract atmospheric turbulences. Then there is "Active optics", which flexes the mirror surface to counteract the gravitational deforming of large and thin mirrors, when the telescope is moved. Both technologies work very well and hand in hand.

You could flex surfaces in a way to achive a variable focal length with just a single lens and without moving the lens mechanically (as is done now with the internal variator group of a zoom). That is basically the same technology our eye employs to focus on different distances.

Having a curved sensor has additional merrits, because it makes lens design easier. For instance you wouldn't need to correct a lens for curvatore of field, which greatly simplifies design and reduces colour aberrations. In large and fast astronomical telescopes large, curved sensors (sensor arrays) are already in usesuccessfully.

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11-29-2009, 05:12 PM   #19
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QuoteOriginally posted by jeryst Quote
I've been having a blast with my K20d. Today, I took a portrait shot of my youngest daughter, and was playing around with it. I cropped just her eye, and the resulting image was a very respectable photo of an eye, so it got me to thinking.

If resolution, memory card capacity, etc. all continues to increase, do you think that at some point in time, photographs will become almost infinitely croppable? Like taking a photo of someone, and then being able to increase magnification to a point where you can see pores, skin structure, etc, like in a microscope? Or maybe taking a wide angle photo of a forest and being able to zoom down to the veins on one particular leaf?

Could it go even further, and allow you to actually magnify to the molecular level?

I know its just science fiction right now, but I wonder how and when it will ever end. Is there some wall that we will eventually run into?

Any physicists out there?
It's the evolution of technology.They try to make it better then the previous.I don't think it will ever end as long as this world is still rotating.Technology is on a roll,especially with cameras.It's really hard to keep up with it all.

11-30-2009, 10:06 AM   #20
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QuoteOriginally posted by Barnster Quote
It's the evolution of technology.They try to make it better then the previous.I don't think it will ever end as long as this world is still rotating.Technology is on a roll,especially with cameras.It's really hard to keep up with it all.
Since my first SLR in the late 60's so much has changed and so rapidly. The camera companys were all building cameras to use with film and there were just a few brands of film. My first SLR had open aperture metering, considered high tech vs stop down metering. Auto exposure came along and then auto focus. For the most part, we were still using the same film. Most of the advances in digital photography have been in just the last 10 years so it's exciting to imagine where things will go in the next 10. Film cameras were always chained to film. Digital sensors are just coming out of the infant stage. If Moore's Law can be applied to digital photography, we can only imagine.
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