Canon's new 16.7MP Digital SLR, with WiFi

LoudMusic writes "Canon has recently announced the EOS 1Ds Mark II, successor to their previous excellent professional cameras. What makes this one so cool is that it can network. The early review over at dpreview.com says there is an optional part that gives it both 802.11a/g and wired networking capabilities. I can see photographers shooting sporting events with a 12" Powerbook in a backpack receiving images to its 80GB drive and automatically uploading them to SI. And with its full 35mm CMOS it is the first camera to effectively reproduce the image quality of 35mm film. I wonder if it plays mp3s too ..."

Image quality of 35mm film?

[gumbo]

And with its full 35mm CMOS it is the first camera to effectively reproduce the image quality of 35mm film.

Don't most of the pro-level DSLRs already have 35mm sensors? Maybe they're trying to say it's the resolution that gets it to 35mm film, but it sounds like they're implying it's the sensor size...

Hrrr

[mobby_6kl]

with a 12" Powerbook

Or any laptop with a 802.11 card.

Innovation that I didn't see coming.

[JorDan Clock]

Usually when something new comes to gadgets, you almost know it was going to happen long before it does, but this time, I was actually suprised and intrigued. This is something I never thought could use wireless networking, but now that it's been done, it seems like something that should have been done long ago.

Re:Image quality of 35mm film?

[temojen]

And I'd be surprised to see a 35mm CCD with better resolution than Fuji Reala.

Who needs the computer?

[SilentChris]

"I can see photographers shooting sporting events with a 12" Powerbook in a backpack receiving images to its 80GB drive and automatically uploading them to SI."

Really? I can see uploading straight from the camera to SI. The computer is an intermediary today because it's a necessity. When every device has is on the internet, the intermediary function of computers will disolve.

Film Quality?

[Colgate2003]

"And with its full 35mm CMOS it is the first camera to effectively reproduce the image quality of 35mm film."

It had been generally accepted that this camera's predecessor, the 1Ds, was close to the quality of medium-format film. We've been beyond the quality of 35mm film for quite some time now...

Ob: Whine about price

[RobertB-DC]

I'm not a professional photographer, so I'm sure they have their reasons for needing an $8,000 digital camera [google.com]. For someone who doesn't make a living taking pictures, though, is there any way to justify a camera that costs more than a used Toyota [google.com]?

who would ever need 640k?

[w1r3sp33d]

Holy crap! Like I am not already working like an insane monkey trying to add hard disks to our server fast enough keeping up with my shutterbug wife and her D100 then somebody needs to make a 16 megapixel camera, damn them! At least T bytes are cheap...

But it doesn't look like they have embraced Adobe's new DNG format yet, wonder who is going to be first with that one? http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/main.html [adobe.com]

Re:Live Pr0n

[valkraider]

It may not be useful on the monitor, but when blown up to a 10 foot wall poster - the high megapixel count is very important... ;)

No point

[Cybertect]

If you're not using the WiFi, take CF card out, place in card reader, insert 2nd card in camera. Carry on shooting while images are being copied to laptop/Portable Digital Storage device.

Otherwise your camera is out of service while you're copying several GigaBytes to another medium.

Pro photographers won't leave the house with only one card.

Besides, it's got FireWire.

samples

[macshune]

Here are some of the full-size samples available on the site:

Sample 1 [dpreview.com]
Sample 2 [dpreview.com]

The rest of samples can be found here [dpreview.com]. I don't want to slashdot poor dpreview. I'm sure as progress marches on, their bandwidth prices skyrocket.

Re:Ob: Whine about price

[mtrupe]

Probably not... But the good news with digital is competition is heating up, and great cameras are coming down in price as fast as computers have. Even this high-end competition affects the low end. You can buy a better 6mp DSLR today for about $800 than what was even available at $20,000 4 years ago. Pretty amazing.

[Rupert Photo] [rupertphotography.com]

Re:Independent reporting

[mattkime]

as long as they're shooting in high res, snapping a bunch of pics with this and transmitting them over 802.11g isn't going to go very fast. most photographers aren't going to want to put up with a lag that poor.

35mm Quality?

[verloren]

As sites such as Luminous Landscape (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/dq.sh tml) point out, we're already there on image quality. Digital and film have different characteristics that make a direct comparison difficult (there isn't really one measure of image quality), subjectively a good 6-8MP DSLR is about the same, and certainly something like a Canon EOS-1Ds is at least as good.

What is less common is having a 35mm-sized sensor, but even that is already available (in fact you can get digital backs for medium format cameras, if you have enough money).

The good news is...

[mtrupe]

Despite the crazy high price of this camera, these developments and competition that is causing them, are driving down the prices of great DSLRs (and digicams in general).

You can buy a better 6mp DSLR today for about $800 than what was even available at $20,000 4 years ago. Pretty amazing. I suspect that within a year or two we will be able to buy a full frame DSLR for $1,000 or less. It used to be cameras didn't change that fast. Now with digital, things are changing as fast as with computers...

[Rupert Photo] [rupertphotography.com]

Re:Cough

[Too Much Noise]

Yeah, but you'd better use a damn good prime lens if you want to scan the film at 4kDPI. Otherwise it's a waste - you're limited by the lens, not by the storing medium.

kinda scary when you think maybe 5-6 years out

[ZuggZugg]

We'll probably have 30-50 megapixels cameras or high resolution motion cameras that use these censors to capture at 30 fps!

Some people seem to think that faster CPUs and bigger hard drives are not needed. They obviously don't play with this kind of stuff.

In maybe 10 years this stuff will be so cheap and common, you'll be able to photograph/film (film is an analogue word - doesn't apply anymore but I can't think of anything else) the pores on peoples faces with the right lenses and huge resolving power of these censors.

Re:Image quality of 35mm film?

[Anonymous Coward]

The f-stops remain the same, it's the apparant focal-length of the lens that changes. Full-frame means a 24x36mm image area, that of traditional 35mm film. Building a 24x36mm sensor for digital photography has been a long time coming. We've had to switch to 14mm lenses for our Nikon D1s to make them equivilant to a 21mm. An 80-200mm telephoto zoom lens has been extended to a 280mm lens though, which is often nice, all the while remaining an f2.8 lens.
The Canon full-size chip is a big deal to news photographers, since we can all go back to our "normal lens" mindset, not having to convert focal lengths in our heads by 1.4x.
Another artifact of this focal length conversion is the fact that the compression of a 200mm or the foreshortening of a 14mm stays the same, meaning that there is 14mm distortion when shooting at what's supposed to be 21mm. It's maddening!

Re:Minor Issue...

[fuzzybassoon]

KISMAC, the WiFi sniffing/ Warwalking tool for OS X has an option to disable sleep mode when the lid is closed. So it is possible to do this, and there are no side effects in terms of heat, at least not with my 15" TiBook. I've tried it.

Re:Nikon

[line.at.infinity]

Yeah, wireless isn't first, but this one supports more standards than just FTP and it also has automation. As soon as the photographter takes a shot, the photo is instantaneously transfered with encryption over the network. This makes for a good argument to choose digital over film in business - imagine the amount of time that's saved when getting the photos ready for clients by choosing digital over film. On the other hand, I don't see this technology as being too useful for personal use.

Re:Full size sensor

[jdunlevy]

Initial post [slashdot.org]: "And with its full 35mm CMOS it is the first camera to effectively reproduce the image quality of 35mm film."

At first I read that significant "and" as signifying:
16.7MP + full-size sensor = effective reproduction of 35mm film.

From dpreview.com [dpreview.com]: "For the first time, medium format image quality combines with access to the world's most extensive range of professional lenses, spanning from 14mm to 1200mm."

Looks like they're saying:
16.7MP + full (35mm)-size sensor = effective reproduction of medium format (bigger than 35mm) film.

?

Re:Minor Issue...

[jargoone]

From the link:

ATTENTION! Using your Mac with closed lid can lead to serious system heat problems!

Why should this be the case? Isn't perfectly reasonable to want to use your laptop while it is closed? Could it be that they sacrificed some functionality to avoid a non-sexy vent on the back?

In any case, I don't have this problem with my laptop running Windows 2000. Like a poster above said, I can make it do precisely what I want when I close the lid, or push the power button, or send it a sleep command. Requiring a hack to keep it on is... a hack. I'm stunned that OS X doesn't have this capability built in.

Re:For pros and commercial photogs?

[earache]

Your blowing a lot of hot air.

I've worked with a lot of professional photographers whom work for magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, etc. who use the generation prior Canon, as well as Nikon's high end digital - all for print work.

Also, I remember using a digital film back for the Hasselblad about 10+ years ago for a lot of catalog work (you couldn't shoot people with it, it was incredibly slow, one shot per color plane).

These "devices" are hardly amateur.

Re:For pros and commercial photogs?

[NerveGas]

I have an HP laser printer that can "do" 1200 dpi, which looks smooth to my eye, where 600 dpi doesn't. So, to print a 16 MB image at 1200 dpi, the result would be on the order of 3 inches by four.

Any "enlargement" above this would mean either using "interpolation" (which reduces resolution, or texture), or adding noise and/or distortion/pixelation.

This is not professional or commercial 35-mm quality yet.

For someone with such extensive photographical expertise, you're making a very amateur mistake. You're comparing the method of photo production (laser printer vs. projection), not the method of photo aquisition.

In other words, just because your laser printer doesn't compare to film doesn't mean that the digital image doesn't compare to film. I've only used a few color lasers, but I've never seen one that did a very decent job of photos.

Even though your 1200-DPI laser doesn't cut it, I've seen photos from a 400-DPI dye-sub which take extremely close examination to tell if they're film or not. By "extremely close", I mean that you have to either (a) have significantly better than 20/20 vision and be able to focus very closely, or (b) have a magnifying glass. And at a 400-DPI resolution, this camera would be producing prints larger than 8"x12" without any interpolation whatsoever.

steve

Re:Its still a sampled image

[be-fan]

Real film is also a sampled image, with the sample size depending on the film's grain size.

Re:Live Pr0n

[zoombat]

I mean, a 16 megapixel image is nice and everything, but not so much useful unless you have a 16.7 megapixel monitor to enjoy it on.

Other folks have mentioned the value of high-resolution images when doing large format printing. The other significant benefit is in cropping. If you take a high-res photo, you can crop and zoom in without noticing a drop in image quality.

Re:Silver halide photography is still safe

[NerveGas]

Of course, there are ways in which "regular" photography is still better. But there are ways in which it isn't. It's like ethernet: Do you want it wired or wireless? The "best" choice depends on the circumstances.

Are you taking a wedding/bridal photo that will be blown up to 16x20, and hang on someone's wall as a priceless memento? Bring your medium- or large- format camera.

Need to shoot a sporting event, and have the pictures in the paper or on the news within hours? Leave the film at home. ..and doesn't require batteries, or a backpack full of a notebook-WiFi, and so on.

No, it just takes a backpack full of film! If you need to take a lot of pictures, I'd rather have a notebook with a 120-gig drive than have 400 rolls of film. But, how often do you need to take over 14,000 images? Like I said, it depends on your situation.

steve

Re:Independent reporting

[techwolf]

I was thinking along the same lines. "Extreme journalism" perhaps? Use a script to upload to a FTP site for immediate use by an agency. It would be quite the reversal to snap a picture and have it immediately available on CNN with a story to follow shortly.

Re:Independent reporting

[dkone]

Seems contradictive: repressive society and open access points.

Re:samples

[infinii]

That first sample is so grainy wtf cares if it's 16MP or 92MP. They couldn't have used a lower ISO setting? It's not like that's a fast moving action shot.

Re:6MP is not enough, not even close!

[timeOday]

4800 DPI scanners yield over 34.5MP in 35mm format and fine grained black & white film can be scanned at even higher resolutions while showing more and more data.

More data, or grain [photographical.net]?

Granted, you did say black & white film, and I couldn't find a comparo for that.

Sensor and optical resolution wrt cropping

[Shenkerian]

I agree with you and have made similar explanations for camera-shopping friends, but I've started being swayed by the cropping crowd.

Basically yes, nearly all hobbyist photographers will print 8x10 or smaller, and 3 or more megapixels will give you a great 8x10. But what if you want to blow up just a quadrant of your frame to that size? Then you want enough sensor resolution to give you at least 3 megapixels in that quadrant.

With consumer lenses, optical resolution will start to lag sensor resolution, but pro SLR glass will almost certainly beat sensor resolutions up to 20 or 30 megapixels. Being able to print sharp 8x10's of a sixth of your entire image is kind of appealing.

Of course if you're a former slide photographer and believe that what you frame and shoot is the photo, then cropping is distasteful to you. But the option is there.

Re:Perspective of a DSLR user. What are your goals

[mrm677]

computer screen/TV pictures: 2 megapixels
8"x10" prints: 3 megapixels and up
12"x18" prints: 6 megapixels and up
bigger prints: the more pixels the better

You have low standards. To make quality 11x14 prints and bigger, I use 4x5" large format film. Although 6x7cm medium-format film would work just as well up to 16x20". In my opinion, a 6 megapixel camera does not make a good 11x14" print...especially some B&W fine art prints.

Of course it is all subjective.

Re:Nice, but. . .

[aderusha]

i think your problem here is that you're shooting crappy photos with a crappy camera and printing it with a crappy printer on crappy paper.

digital photography is taking over not only the commercial photography world but also the art photgraphy world, both of which demand the highest of quality. spend $2000 on something like a canon 10d and an epson r800 and i think you'll find very different results - except for the crappy lighting and composure for which you'd only have yourself to blame.

Re:35mm sensors are overrated

[aderusha]

you're only further establishing my point - larger sensors result in better photos. they also draw more current, are more expensive to produce, require larger lens elements and larger camera bodies. if you're hunting for a handy point-and-shoot camera from best buy these things are all negatives. if you're taking photos professionally, these things aren't issues.