Rangefinder Magazine
April 2005
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Digital Photography by John Rettie
Futuristic Camera—Thinking Out of the Box!
Judging by the news emanating from this year’s PMA show in Orlando there was precious little news to report.
Compared to previous shows this was a shocker to many people, as we have come to expect announcements of exciting new cameras and advances in technology. Instead the big news was the appearance of a major phone company (Nokia) as an exhibitor, a new f/2 zoom lens from Olympus and the potential bankruptcy of Leica.
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| The LCD preview monitor, left, can be detached, the battery is housed in an extended handgrip, and the lower sliding center section contains a tripod quick-release base. Illustration by Carl Lozada; inset photo by Bonnie Costanzo. |
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What’s going on? Has the photo industry run out of steam? Have we reached a zenith in the digital camera development?
It’s a relevant question and one that set my mind thinking. I know I am not alone in many of my ideas because I see others voicing similar opinions in forums on numerous web sites.
In the continuing digital revolution, we are seeing some fundamental changes. For example, a Baby Bell swallowed up AT&T as AT&T proved incapable of adapting to the new world in telecommunications. Ironically, SBC, the company that bought AT&T, may see itself disappearing in the future as telephone service switches to VOIP (voice over the internet) and wireless carriers.
I believe the mobile phone will become the center of average consumers’ digital world. It will be their phones, music players, PDAs, Internet access and, of course, cameras. The average person will no longer need a PC as their mobile phone will replace it for accessing the Internet and managing music and photography. Of course, there will be a need for an external hard disc or online backup storage and a dock to hook up the phone to a keyboard and a bigger monitor. Naturally, this monitor will also double as TV screen, and the external hard disc will double as the recorder of choice for TV shows and movies.
Microsoft has to be worried, as demand for home PCs will plummet. Likewise, traditional camera companies should be concerned as the demand for point-and-shoot cameras will also drop. That’s unless they adapt and start producing camera phones. Its no wonder Leica is having a tough time adapting.
What, you might ask, does this have to do with PMA and professional photographers?
Well, Nokia was an exhibitor at PMA for the first time. Camera phones may not deliver great photographs now, but you can bet they will very soon as the quality of their small image capture devices and lenses improves. They will provide sufficient quality for the vast majority of consumers who are not into photography as a hobby.
Of course just as businesses will still need powerful PCs, professional photographers will still need high-end cameras. What they will not want is today’s current crop of digital cameras, which are, in my opinion, just recycled film cameras.
In my opinion, this is why PMA was so uninteresting this year: All the new cameras on display were just me-too cameras that did not move the needle.
Camera companies have got to start thinking out of the box. Pun intended.
For example, anyone who has used a consumer camera with a flip-out rotating LCD screen on the back will know how useful this is when framing shots. It allows one to move the camera away from their eye and still frame accurately.
So let’s have an LCD that can preview an image on a SLR camera. Can’t be done, you say? Well, Fujifilm has a preview mode on its new S3 Finepix Pro camera, and Canon has introduced a Japan-only version of the EOS-20D with simple preview capabilities.
My proposal goes even further. Make the LCD removable. You hold the camera in your right hand, and with a smaller grip on the left of the body, you can quickly release the LCD so it instantly becomes the viewer, disabling the optical viewfinder. A photographer can then hold the camera over his head or poke it around a corner of a building while viewing the scene on the LCD. Think of the possibilities—paparazzi will love it.
Bluetooth or the upcoming wireless USB protocol will provide communication between the LCD and the camera body. A cable could be used to provide the juice to power the LCD instead of an onboard battery.
The accompanying artist’s impression gives an idea of what a dream digital camera might look like. As there is no need for a film transport mechanism, the only constraints are the necessity to place the image capture sensor behind the lens. Recently I have been trying an Olympus E-300, and it does not even have the pentaprism protruding on top of the camera, thus demonstrating that change in the fundamental design of SLR cameras is possible. The E-300 has only a small portion of the body on the left-hand side of the lens, so your nose does not touch the back of the camera, smudging the LCD screen. Instead, your nose is positioned along the left side of the camera body out of the way.
While holding a hefty pro camera, it would be nice to have most of the weight on the right-hand side so it does not twist one’s wrist as much. Why does the battery pack have to be placed along the bottom of the camera body? Why not put it in the grip and make it deeper so it’s more ergonomic? If such a design was adopted, then a simple sliding section in the unused lower center portion of the camera could incorporate a tripod quick release bracket that could remain attached at all times as it would not protrude below the base of the camera.
As far as the image sensor is concerned, I believe there is no need for a 35mm film size sensor. An image sensor that size will soon be overkill just as 120 film has been overkill for most photographers for many years. Apart from the added price of larger sensors, there is the larger overhead required for processing and storage needs of large files. In addition, whether we like it or not, there is no denying that as pixel density has risen, the quality derived from lenses designed for film is reaching a limit.
Canon and Nikon have introduced lenses optimized for digital cameras, and many are not backwardly compatible. We even need new wide-angle lenses for full-frame camera bodies to get optimum quality. In the long run, backward compatibility does not really matter as once most professionals have switched to digital, they rarely go back to using a film camera.
Olympus made the decision a few years ago to introduce a whole new system built from the ground up for digital. Soon it will introduce a 7–14mm zoom lens, which is equivalent to a 14–28mm zoom on a 35mm camera. It has also announced a 14–35mm (28–70) and 35–100mm (70–200) zooms with a fixed aperture of f/2.0, making them the fastest zooms on the market. They are no bigger than a similar f/2.8 lens, as they are optimized for the small four-thirds image sensor. This shows there are benefits to smaller sensors when it comes to lens selection.
There’s no telling how many pixels will be the optimum for pro cameras. First reports indicate the image quality obtained from the newly introduced Nikon D2X is excellent. It packs 12.2 million pixels on a 23.7x15.7mm sensor, which is equivalent to 28.3 million pixels on a 24x36mm sensor. Newer consumer cameras produce good results, at least at lower ISO ratings, from 7MP sensors that are only 5.3x7.2mm in size. That’s equivalent to approximately 67MP for a DX size chip or 157MP on a 35mm size chip. So we still have a long way to go before finding the sweet spot for pixel density in pro cameras.
More important, each pixel on future sensors will be individually controlled so the ISO can be changed on the fly from one area to another, increasing the dynamic range many fold. Ideally, the sensors will be a square shape, so the camera body will not need to be rotated for vertical shots. If the cost of the increase in size remains prohibitive, the sensor could rotate internally for vertical picture taking avoiding the need to rotate the camera body. After all, with the ergonomically shaped large handgrip it will not be possible to rotate it for vertical shooting.
Many other features in my dream camera are not really new as they have already appeared on consumer cameras. These include image stabilization in the camera and auto cleaning of the sensor. On the more mundane level, the camera will include other features such as 1⁄500 flash sync, a bigger and brighter optical viewfinder; pop-up built-in flash; auto adjusting ISO in preset shutter speed and aperture modes; AA battery backup; and integrated wireless transmission for sending files and to fire external flashguns.
The more I describe the camera, the more I realize there is nothing really revolutionary about it. Instead, it’s adopting features that have already appeared in an entirely different package that looks nothing like a 35mm film camera body. Ironically, when you think about it I’ve almost ended up describing a smaller version of a Hasselblad camera body with an external handgrip and an LCD viewfinder in place of a film magazine.
All of this discussion may be moot—once the quality of video camcorders becomes so good, many photographers will be able to grab still images from their camcorder while shooting continuously at 30 fps, for minutes at a time.
Bottom line: I bet in 10 years average consumers will use their mobile phones for the majority of everyday digital needs, consumer point-and-shoot cameras will be a shrunken business, and professional still cameras will be totally different from those we use today.
 Quick Book Review
The Art of Pixel Processing
Some photographers and all graphic artists are interested in altering images after capture to make a picture tell a better story. On the other hand, most photographers are more attuned to shooting an image as near as possible to what they desire in the camera.
In this book (Photoshop CS for Photography: The Art of Pixel Processing, 136 pages, $24.95) British photographer Tom Ang describes in detail how to use Photoshop to produce technically perfect photographs without resorting to distortion filters and all the myriad of special effects loved by many artists. Each of the full-color pages describes in detail how to go about mastering techniques such as levels and tones, color correction, dodging and burning in, and the use of curves.
Ang describes procedures in photographic terms, making it a great read for anyone who is familiar with traditional photography and wants to grasp the new way of doing things. Ang points out that the basic techniques described apply to images captured on film and digitized as well as to photographs captured digitally. The basic techniques described also apply to image editing programs beside Photoshop.
John Rettie is a photojournalist who resides in Santa Barbara, CA. He has been using a camera as a professional for 35 years, a computer for 25 years, and has combined his knowledge of both for the past 12 years. Readers can contact him by email at john@johnrettie.com or by snail-mail c/o Rangefinder.
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