Canon's new 16.7MP Digital SLR, with WiFi 546
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 ..."
Gota love those upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)
Me too! (Score:3, Interesting)
While I'm kidding, I'm sure it's just a matter of time...
moblogging tool? (Score:4, Interesting)
i could see someone walking around a city taking shots and as they walk around the camera is uploading those shots to a website and resizing and posting them to their photoblog. hot.
Minor Issue... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't... I'm pretty sure all PowerBooks go to sleep when you shut the computer lid. Assuming you shut it correctly, of course. You can 'trick' the computer into thinking the lid is open when it's really not, but I don't recommend it, because you don't really know what the computer's going to do when it comes to going back to sleep or staying awake. :-) I've tried.
Nonetheless, being able to set up a 'base station' of sorts with a computer receiving pictures off the network is pretty neat. About damn time, too... I'll be waiting for the $250 version.
Not the first (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, no... (Score:2, Interesting)
digital cameras with wifi are cool (Score:5, Interesting)
It was definitly pretty neat.
If all cameras had this (or any sort of net connection, even via GPRS) it would be great to use a script like galleryadd to pump the photos into your Gallery from the road. I do it via procmail, shell scripts, and galleryadd now with my hiptop's camera (although I suppose you could do it with any camera that allows photos with email attachments).
Re:Live Pr0n (Score:3, Interesting)
It's great that we have digital cameras making leaps and bounds on resolutions, but the monitors on our desktop are not making such high leaps. 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.
It will be fun to see the next generation of digital imagery with 500+ dpi displays. maybe someday.
Independent reporting (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Full size sensor (Score:3, Interesting)
Look here for pics I shot with the Kodak SLR/n:
http://www.onemodelplace.com/djs3
it sucks becuase: (Score:2, Interesting)
1) ieee1394 wifi adapter is going to extremely expensive, since they are produced specifically for this device
2) it's extremely annoying to have a wifi dongle hanging on the cameras
3) wifi is extremely cheap to integrate into consumer devices.($20 for OEM) with a camera this big and expensive, why not just throw the chipsets into the camera? Well i guess this way you can always upgrade the external adapter when a new standard come out...but the camera will be outdate by then as well...
Blurb is very wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
And, the Nikon D2h had wi-fi capabilities first. And, this is more a studio camera than something a sports photographer would use, so the Sports Illustrated reference is a bit off as well.
Re:Not the first (Score:3, Interesting)
unfortunately the MP count on that camera was offset by the ridiculous amount of noise it produced. its basically been ignored in the photo community.still, i'd wait to see pics from this thing to make sure it doesn't have the same problem
many uses (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Full size sensor (Score:1, Interesting)
Telephoto lenses can vignette at the wide end of their range just as easily as any other lenses. If you are comparing a full frame sensor versus, say, the 10D, then you need to compare equivalent lens ranges.
Example:
10D with a 50mm lens (x1.6) = 80mm
In other words, the 10D with the cropping requires a 50mm lens to take the exact same picture at the same range as the 1Ds with an 80mm lens.
Big deal right?
Well try taking a picture in the 16-17mm range. You *can't* do that with the 10D because there are no lenses with a wider angle than that (except perhaps a fisheye lens).
Full frame sensors are very useful for anyone doing professional landscape photography, or working in close spaces where you can't back up as much to get everything in the shot (such as an interior decorator).
Now, do you imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)
P.S.: What a waste of computing power, especially than you've got your PowerBook with you, and moreover, do you suggest the audio files to be uploaded wirelessly?!
NOT the image quality of 35mm film (Score:2, Interesting)
Film has far more resolution than a 16.7MP. Remember, MP is just what it says, MP or mega pixels. Film does not have pixels. So until they can pack in so many pixels that you cannot see a diagonal line as a series of stair steps, the resolution is not "35mm film quality."
Even so, don't forget that film is a subtractive medium (light is subtracted from full white when film is projected in a cinema or in a slide show). Whereas TV, PC, and digital cameras use an additive (light is "turned on" at various points or pixels to "form" an image). Kinda like bitmap versus postscript, at least as far as lineart goes.
Major impact for law enforcement and politics. (Score:5, Interesting)
Two pieces of background:
Item 1: The microwave-linked minicam (where the picture was on people's screens before the billyclub finished smashing the lens) made a MAJOR change in news reporting. No longer could a corrupt administration use its police or troops to block coverage of an event by siezing or destroying the camera that had recorded it.
(This first hit - big time - during the protests->police riot->general rioting associated with the Democratic Convention of 1968. The live images of the police brutalizing the protesters and reporters couldn't be blocked by camera-smashing. This turned the general population in mass from a "silent majority" going along with the war to a radicalized population appalled by the government's treatment of the anti-war protesters. It had a major effect on the presidential election and the ending of the Vietnam (un)War.)
Item 2: The amateur videocam footage of the Rodney King beating - taken from nearby - created a simlar outrage against the police involved. (And led to laws against photographing "public officials in the performance of their duty" to try to head off further such incidents. B-( ) But personal videocams and still cameras still suffer from the pre-minicam issue: Destroying or confiscating the camera prevents the distribution of the image. So while such photography has some potential to expose official misconduct, it is still limited.
A personal camera with a WiFi link can dump the image up a hotspot and across the net or to a nearby (and not easily discoverable) digital recording device. Now the image can no longer be suppressed.
Imagine a hundred thousand people armed with such cameras, feeding images to, say, The Drudge Report, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Move On dot Org, politics.slashdot.org, and the rest of the political blogosphere.
In the next crisis this could be a significant step in the rise of the net as a news source and its replacement of the establishment media.
ID (not 1Ds) will be used by sports photographgers (Score:3, Interesting)
The submitter is a bit mistaken that the 1Ds Mark II will be used by "photographers shooting sporting events" as the 1D Mark II (with the higher frame rate and focal length multiplier HELPS for telephoto shots, plus about half the cost) will be the DSLR of choise for these folks ... whereas the 1Ds Mark II is targetted towared studio work ... although obviousely both would do well in either environment.
BTW, I've actually used a 1D Mark II and it is an amazing DSLR - scary how fast you can shoot pictures ... and I even caught a semi-decent sequence of my having a hack of a water skiing crash [komar.org]
Missing Feature (Score:3, Interesting)
Rip of Britain. And Europe. (Score:3, Interesting)
Gaaad. With a GBP/USD exchange rate of almost 2:1, it should be about £3,999. We get stiffed. Again. I bought an EOS300D, and I was thinking about going over the US to get it. If it wasn't for the warranty issues, I would have. And that was only to save £200, (when the flight costs were taken out).
Re:Independent reporting (Score:1, Interesting)
How long until the police bring some serious jamming equipment to these events?
Re:Independent reporting (Score:3, Interesting)
Uploading the photos before police shoot bean bag bullets above your eye would be nice. Did anybody see that horrible video? Carl Kesser's story, or GIS his name. [saveourciv...erties.org]
Perspective of a DSLR user. What are your goals? (Score:5, Interesting)
For 98% of the slashdot crowd, I'll assure you that 6 megapixels is enough.
Ask yourself, what is your goal? For probably half the people, it's a shot that looks decent on your monitor or in email. Well, even 2 megapixels will do that in style.
For the other half of the users, they want to be able to make prints. This is where resolution comes in, the more, the better. With the 3 megapixel cameras, I was able to do nice 8"x10" prints. Anything bigger and it for sure suffered when compared with a print from the 21 megapixel slide scans.
Since 6 megapixels came out, my 8x10 prints don't comparatively suffer next to slide scans printed at the same size. They both look killer.
Now, I like to make prints on Super-A3 sized paper ( at 12" x 18" ) and at that size, I can still easily see the advantage that 21 megapixel slide scans have over the 6 megapixel DSLR shots. But, the big prints are beautiful in either case and I still make them all the time and never feel too cheated resolution wise.
With this 16 megapixel camera, the results would be superb next to the big slide scans. There would be no problem printing at 12"x18" or larger. I would be seriously wanting one of the larger format Epson's that do 20" wide prints or even the 3 and 4 foot wide printers. This camera has the resolution.
So whats your goal? This is kind of a swag but:
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
Re:Now, do you imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)
Eh, that's pretty much bullshit. It's about 15 MB for RAWs and 5.5 for JPEGS. The finished TIFF from the RAWS may be about that size, but that's not something that's going to be handled by the camera.
Specs listing [canon.com]
Re:that's a lot of megapixels (Score:3, Interesting)
And no, a higher resolution will not expose anything but smaller details than the eye can perceive.
Re:Effectively the quality of 35mm film? NOT. (Score:5, Interesting)
Your entire argument hinges on lpm measurements. These measurements are, of course, taken on high-contrast black and white targets -- typically 1000:1 contrast ratios.
Now, it is true that when you are taking pictures of closely spaced 1000:1 contrast black and white lines, film still kicks the crap out of digital. But suppose, just suppose, that the average photographer will NEVER IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE take such a picture. The performance in such circumstances might then be pretty meaningless, huh?
The simple fact is that film's resolution is highly contrast dependent. It shows extremely high resolution while dealing with extreme-contrast targets, but performs much worse in real-world conditions. Digital sensor resolution, on the other hand, is largely insensitive to contrast. For real-world scenes and not 1000:1 test targets, a 16MP sensor absolutely annihilates 35mm film in terms of overall image quality.
Just what I need.. (Score:1, Interesting)
What were they thinking? Now snipers [engadget.com] can steal images right off a photographer before they even know it.
Re:Effectively the quality of 35mm film? NOT. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the real world, on print, where it matters to 99.9% of all users, high-end digital capture equals or exceeds film capture. My images run full-bleed across large-format layouts in W Magazine, Vogue, and you can't see the difference between the shots I used to take on my RZ67 and the ones I now take on my 1Ds. That's all that matters. You will never meet an editor who asks you what kind of line-pair resolution you can provide.
Could I get a theoretically sharper result with large format and film? Who cares? I've got a job to do, and digital does it better than film did. It's only about where the rubber meets the road.
not quite accurate... (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope, maybe the first to have a 35mm sensor. But, there have been a number of cameras out with medium format sensors for quote a while now. Even at 6mp, a medium format sensor will outperform a smaller sensor with a higher pixel count because there will be MUCH less bleeding of light across pixels.
Check out the products from Creo such as the Aptus [creo.com] or the much larger MP Valeo family.
Re:Live Pr0n (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Full size sensor (Score:3, Interesting)
I once read in a book on sensors that Fuji Velvia slide film has a theoretical resolution of over 19 megapixels.
The problem is finding a lens that can resolve that much detail... so in practice (especially when shooting hand held) you might expect to get more like 10 megapixels out of a Velvia slide. Then if you want to digitize it, you have to scan it....through yet another optical system, onto a sensor, sacrificing more quality.
If you look at the problem that way... digital cameras surpassed film way back at about 6-10 megapixels. Which is exactly what people were saying when the original Canon EOS 1Ds came out.
But Velvia is not the highest resolution film, and film photographers have the option of using heavy tripods and great lenses (the same ones available for digital cameras)...and you dont have to digitize your slides/transparencies. You can, for example, project them with an analog projector.
This calls into question, how would you project a 16 megapixel digital image? You can't as far as I know, without throwing away data. You could always write the digital image back out to transparency film and project it analog... in fact, thats the only way I can think of that would have results equal to a traditional slide.
Projecting slides is bad for them, so you then have to consider that you need to duplicate a slide before projecting it. This cuts down on resolution as well... so maybe, a 16 megapixel image written to film is higher quality than a slide thats been duplicated. (the process of duplicating a slide involves re-photographing it with yet more questionable optics.).
And in the end, wether you are projecting a duplicated slide or a digital image that has been written to film, they are both subject to the optics of the analog projector...maybe even making the whole debate moot (if you have a bad lens on the projector).
Dynamic Range and Resolution are not the same! (Score:2, Interesting)
Secondly, you confuse dynamic range and resolution. Dynamic range is the difference between the darkest and brightest spot captured simultaneously. Resolution is how many steps there are between two the two extreemes.
There are other very important differences. On the digital camera the pixel elements are evenly spaced where on a film the pigments are not. Even though a single colour pigment on the film is very small, the randomnes of their location makes the resolution lower.
I do not know what the dynamic range is for film or cameras, nor have I seen a objective comparison of the two.
Re:Cough (Score:1, Interesting)
The 35mm was nearly *useless* because of the grain. Regular consumer slide film was even worst. I could only use 64T in medium format.
Fuji films such as Velvia were better but still grainy, for example in clear blue sky.
When people say that 35mm slide film have 21MP of information, I'm astounded. My 6MP digital shots are PRISTINE. No grain. After I clean the sensor I can take a picture of the clear blue sky and each pixel is the same exact color. The 35mm doesn't even come close.
Maybe you guys are all using some exotic film or something, but in my experience, digital surpassed 35mm once it passed 6MP in a quality dSLR.
I guess it's like the folks who still think records are as good as CDs or something.
Actually I consider vinyl records to be like medium format film. To me, 35mm film is like a cassette: it even comes in a crappy plastic shell with exposed media hanging all over the place. Good riddance, I'm glad to see 35mm die. Looking at all these high-resolution (but GRAINY) scans on my hard drive makes me sad.
Re:The comparisons are marketing fluff (Score:4, Interesting)
For photographers on the move (like myself), the following make up the initial capital investment of a digital camera:
-instant feedback on exposure. If you know how to read a histogram, you can get vastly better pictures.
-no film/development cost
-the ability to shoot different ISOs on the fly. Some cameras allow you to set a minimum shutter speed and will increase (or decrease) the ISO incrementally if lighting conditions change rapidly. This is invaluable.
Shooting RAW requires more post processing work by the photographer, but at least you dont have to deal with scanning slides/negatives and cleaning up dust and scratches.
Re:Perspective of a DSLR user. What are your goals (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, I wont argue with you. Individual tastes vary, and lots of photographs which undoubtably are "fine art" are anything but high resolution.
And don't misinterpret my standards to be "low". I love high resolution. I love the look of my 21MP slide scans printed corner to corner on 12x18 paper. Like I said, I can see that my 6 megapixel can't keep up with the resolution. But I'll show those prints to 9 out of 10 people and they'll be more than happy with the resolution.
And, if I could, I'd make 11x14 prints using 4"x5" large format film as well. Unfortunately the cost of the camera, lens, film, development and printing would have me affording about 1 print a month
In comparison, digital photography is a breath of freedom. I've shot 11,000 frames on my Canon digital cameras. Zero added cost per shutter click. At my local pro-lab rates with 35mm Fuji slide film, that would have been over $5,000 in slide film and development. Instead I've spent about $500 on Epson Archival Matte paper and ink.
Your goals and your pocketbook are undoutably different than mine, but don't call my standards low.
Re:Gota love those upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
I've wondered when the MP increase will stop. When is there enough data? Lets say we hit 50MP in the next couple years - one would think that that might be enough data to replicate a picture into any printed size. So then what? How do we make cameras better?
I guess it's the same with the home PC. 600mhz and 128mb of memory is probably enough power to get all your web surfing and email sending taken care of. So then what? How do we make it better after that?
Just curious.
Re:samples (Score:1, Interesting)
Sample 1
http://img2.dpreview.com.nyud.net:8090/gallery/ca
Sample 2
http://img2.dpreview.com.nyud.net:8090/gallery/ca
the other samples
http://www.dpreview.com.nyud.net:8090/articles/ca
Speaking of Pr0n.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Playboy has a tradition of using view cameras with photographic plates to do such shots, and given the extremely high resolution of photographic plates used on view cameras, such a camera is necessary for pictures that are sometimes is printed at the equivalent size of four pages at the page size Playboy uses!
Yeah, you need that with a Windows laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the time, nothing. So Apple optimized (as they so often do) for the common case.
Furthermore, Apple also realized that at some point you might want the computer back again and open the lid. And when you did so, you'd want the computer to be ready right away.
So, they optimized for that case as well and made sure the laptops wake up as fast as you can open the lid. I have seen and used Windows laptops that NEVER woke up, and guys carrying laptops around the halls at work with screens open terrified to close them lest they go to that dark sleep, never to reawaken.
Seriously, the instant-on wake is one of the major reasons why I initially chose a Powerbook over any other laptop. You say it's great can tell your laptop not to go to sleep - but the reason they added this is to solve a problem, not so much to help you out for an uncommon use of laptops.
And as others have noted you CAN tell an Apple laptop to keep working with the screen closed. And it works that way naturally with a second monitor, the only major use I can think of with the screen closed.