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from the who-would-want-a-camera-that-was-heavy-and-dark? dept.
The creator of the new Light digital camera explains how he made it work:
The best digital cameras today are SLRs (single-lens reflex cameras), which use a movable mirror to guide the same light rays that fall on the sensor into the viewfinder. These cameras normally have precisely ground glass lenses and large, high-quality image sensors. In the right hands, they can shoot amazing pictures, with brilliant colours and pleasing lighting effects, often showing a crisply focused subject and an aesthetically blurred background.
But these cameras are big, heavy, and expensive: A good digital SLR (DSLR) with a decent set of lenses—including a standard 50 mm, a wide angle, and a telephoto, for example—can easily set you back thousands of dollars.
So most photos today aren't being shot with DSLRs but with the tiny camera modules built into mobile phones. Nobody pretends these pictures match the quality of a photograph taken by a good DSLR; they tend to be grainy, and the camera allows very little artistic control. But smartphone cameras certainly are easy to carry around.
Can't we have it both ways ? Couldn't a high-quality yet still-tiny camera somehow be fit into a mobile device ?
The Light camera starts with a collection of inexpensive plastic-lens camera modules and mechanically driven mirrors. We put them in a device that runs the standard Android operating system along with some smart algorithms. The result is a camera that can do just about everything a DSLR can—and one thing it can't: fit in your pocket.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Friday October 28 2016, @08:12AM
For those who aren't already aware, Apple recently bought a company (LinX Imaging) that was making a multi-lens camera system for mobile devices. The system had the capability to take input from lenses with different focal lengths and combine the data into a clearer, brighter, or higher resolution image, or simulate optical zoom capabilities through software merging of the images from the different fixed focal length lenses. I think LinX was demoing dual and triple-lens setups. The technology made it into the Apple iPhone 7 Plus as a dual-lens module, and with the iOS 10.1 update all iPhone 7 Plus owners now have the ability to simulate the kind of nice background blur (known as "bokeh") that you get when you use an expensive large-aperture lens on a DSLR. It uses data from the dual-lens setup to create a 3D depth-map of the image and selectively blur anything not within the chosen focal plane. You end up with a very passable impression of the kind of attractive portraiture effect, the "popping" of the sharply focused subject from the blurred background, that you would normally need a decent DSLR with APS-C or Full Frame size sensor and a large aperture lens to get. It isn't perfect, just what any skilled Photoshop user might be able to do with 20 minutes of careful masking and blurring, but it is pretty darn good and happens instantly right in the camera.
DSLR fans (or as they like to call themselves, "real photographers") are of course still scoffing at this as just a silly gimmick, but this is of course just an initial peek into what software will be able to do using a multi-lens setup. These multi-lens camera systems will end up being able to do things, or at least simulate things, that no DSLR will ever be able to do. And they will end up being much cheaper than DSLRs because the tiny plastic lenses are a tiny fraction of the cost of even low end DSLR lenses.
One of the primary issues that remains with DSLRs is dynamic range. There have been slight improvements in dynamic range but it is still incredibly easy to blow out highlights in an image that contains both dark shadows and bright areas. Photographers have to pay close attention to the histogram and underexpose images just to avoid blowing the highlights out. Then they take those images and selectively raise the brightness of the shadows in order to bring back detail. This of course has a tendency to introduce a lot of noise in the image. While there has also been some progress in reducing the total amount of noise captured from DSLR sensors, it is still a tedious and delicate balancing process for photographers to create final images that truly resemble what the human eye sees in a high-contrast scene.
So how can these limitations be surpassed? One answer is image stacking. You take images using different exposures and stack them together. The nature of this process of course requires that nothing moves in the scene in between shots. The same technique is used for night photography. Many long exposures are taken and then stacked together to produce a clear image of the night sky. These techniques are impossible to use on anything that's moving quickly, and normally must be done with the camera on a stable tripod. But what if you had a dozen sensors all recording the same scene in the exact same instant? You wouldn't need to worry about anything moving between shots. Any pixel in the scene that produced a signal wildly different from the signal from other sensors can be discarded as noise, or rectified to be closer to the signal from the other sensors. Thus, more total light is captured for the scene, and noise is filtered out, and different sensors can be set to different sensitivities to capture both dark and bright areas of the image clearly. Unless you could vary the sensitivity of individual pixels on the DSLR sensor, there is no way a DSLR can ever match what a multi-sensor camera might be capable of.
So go ahead and scoff at this as some kind of gimmick, but I really don't believe that it is. I believe that this camera represents the future of consumer cameras. Except the consumer camera market is almost dead. So what this really represents is the future of smartphone cameras. All consumer cameras will eventually be smartphones, for many reasons very well laid out in this prescient YouTube video [youtube.com] by Tony Northrup. This all seemed fairly obvious to me as soon as I saw the demo from LinX, and the resulting iPhone 7 Plus dual-lens system that eventually came from it. The only thing that surprises me is that someone already has a much more sophisticated version coming out just a few months from now. It's expensive, but it will be popular, and there will be much more affordable versions appearing in short order. Every high-end smartphone will soon have a minimum of two cameras, then three, four, etc. Within a few years the back of most popular smartphones will look very similar to this Light L16 camera. And they will take remarkably good photos in many situations.
What will DSLRs still be needed for? Well, extremely high-res landscape photography, maybe. Night/astrophotography, maybe. Extreme telephoto wildlife photography, probably. Studio photography, where you completely control the light anyway, so no need for real-time single-shot HDR capability. Sports, especially low-light indoor sports like basketball, or really fast-moving stuff like racing. Maybe. There will still be plenty of things for a long time that a DSLR will do a bit better. But for many of the things that amateurs or even semi-pros use cameras for, DSLRs will soon end up just not being necessary, or even necessarily the better choice.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ