Yup, it’s the year of the tablet computer. Quite why all these manufacturers are rushing to market when they have no delivery system for content – books, games and movies – I don’t know, but the one that does, Apple, will announce its version on January 27 and I suspect it will be worth waiting for. Sales are rumored to start in April, 2010. A direct, wireless link to iTunes is a given.
I’m hoping for not just a playback device but also a half-decent computer which will allow processing of pictures in Lightroom or the like. Here’s hoping.
Artist’s rendering.
Disclosure: Long AAPL call options at the time of writing.
With smaller and smaller digital sensors lenses get shorter and depth of field grows. It’s tough to beat the laws of optics but, in my opinion, all those calling for ever faster small lenses to limit depth of field and thus differentiate the subject from its surroundings just don’t get it. That’s yesterday’s technology.
The faster the lens, the larger the lens, which defeats the whole purpose of compactness – the very attribute in a camera that makes you take it with you.
What I think is needed is what I call Auto Blurâ„¢. We already have face recognition technology. So why not add technology to blur everything that is not the main subject. Rollover the image to see what I’m talking about (renders fine in Chrome and Safari on my Mac). Refresh your browser if the image is not visible. Will not work on mobile devices.
Thumbsucker before and (mouseover) after AutoBlurâ„¢.
This is a typical G1 image with the kit lens at 18mm fully open at f/3.9. Everything is sharp.
Now, in this case, the background in the mouseover version was tortuously conferred using PS CS2 and the lasso tool – not my idea of fun – but why shouldn’t this be a simple user choice in the camera’s settings?
Software is cheap and weightless. Fast lenses are not.
Follow-up: A reader has alerted me to a Photoshop plugin from Alien Skin named Bokeh which provides many options for the blurring of backgrounds. However, the plugin is seriously overpriced at $199, as the key step – selection of what is to be blurred – remains the exact same time consuming process in Photoshop which I had to use above. So it’s not a solution. Combining face/shape recognition technology with auto-blurring is the approach for those who favor picture taking over picture processing.
Further follow-up: Anothe reader has pointed me to Nik Software’s Viveza 2 – see the Comments to this piece. I see two advantages and one drawback. The advantages are that you do not need Photoshop, as the plug-in will work with Lightroom or Aperture. Further, the selection tool in Viveza 2 is truly amazing – exactly what is missing from Alien Skin’s Bokeh which uses Photoshop’s clunky selection tools which are labor intensive at the best of times. But the key drawback of Viveza 2 is that it does not provide adjustments of sharpness which is what the above piece is all about. Instead (click the link provided at the end of Arun’s Comment) you have to resort to machinations in Photoshop once again. So if only Nik Software could add a sharpness slider to all the other sliders in their tool, that would seem to do the trick until Panasonic or Sony do this with in camera software. Or, even better, if Adobe decides to add this sort of thing to Lightroom – now wouldn’t that be nice?
One reason the news is always bad is because good news is boring.
Never was this made clearer than by the fellows at Monty Python who, responding to this sad fact, crafted a ‘Good News’ news broadcast. The presenter, big smile and all, repeated variations on the theme ‘And in more good news today, no wombats were killed on the freeway’.
The Wombat Good News is at 2:50 into the clip.
And chat boards are, for the most part just like the news and hospital waiting rooms. Both specialize in bad news. You don’t go there when all is hunky dory.
So it’s difficult to make sense of the fairly common complaint on Panasonic G1/GH1 discussion fora that has it that Panny’s best and brightest suffers from a potentially fatal defect whereby a strap lug will detach itself, leaving your favorite in pieces on the concrete sidewalk. I mean, ‘No strap lug detached itself today’ is right up there in wombat country. You won’t read about it. It’s a skewed sample whose statistical significance is impossible to determine.
Anyway, here’s hoping yours remain attached. Using a wrist strap doubles the load, of course, so I have $650 set aside in case one of my lugs fails and that I fail to prevail over the schmuck warranty lawyers at Panny USA. (It’s not personal Panny – I administer equal opportunity offense to the whole profession).
Samsung is rolling out its NX10 mirrorless DSLR any day now – much the same concept as the Panasonic G1/GH1 but with the larger APS-C sensor and using superior rear LCD screen technology. Boy, if anyone knows about LCDs it’s Samsung as they are one of the largest manufacturers of these in all sizes.
Sadly it’s still modeled, like the Panny twins, after the conventional DSLR silhouette, with that silly prism hump, but that will not last long, I am sure. Overall it seems about as small as the G1.
I can only applaud. It’s another nail in the coffin of the flapping mirror/pentaprism design which has seen its day in the sun. The user gains compactness and a quieter tool with less weight. So the tool gets used more as a result.
Can a full size sensor variant with no prism hump be far behind?
Now Sammy, where’s the British Racing Green version, please?
The traditional approach to optical design has always been to try and correct aberrations in the glass. As apertures get larger and focal lengths get shorter, this gets ever harder to do, so you end up with ridiculously oversized lenses, their bulk further compounded by the need to clear flapping mirrors through the use of ever more complex retrofocus designs.
Some of the results of these design dictates can be seen in gargantuan lenses for full frame DSLRs, best illustrated by showing their weight and bulk. Some examples (weight in ozs, dimensions in inches – length x diameter, volume in cubic inches):
Canon 14mm f/2.8 L II: 20 ozs, 3.7″ x 3.2″, 29.7 cu. in.
Canon 24mm f/1.4 L: 20 ozs, 3.4″ x 3.7″, 36.5 cu. in.
Canon 35mm f/1.4 L: 20 ozs. 3.4″ x 3.1″, 25.7 cu. in.
Nikon 14mm f/2.8 ED: 24 ozs, 3.8″ x 3.4″, 34.5 cu. in.
Things get worse when you get into wide zooms:
Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L: 22 ozs, 4.4″ x 3.5″, 42.3 cu. in.
Canon 17-40mm f/4 L: 18 ozs, 3.8″ x 3.3″, 32.5 cu. in.
Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 EF-S:35 ozs, 5.2″ x 3.9″, 62.1 cu. in.
Nikon 17-35mm f/2,8 EF-S: 27 ozs, 4.2″ x 3.3″, 35.9 cu. in.
Without doubt these are some of the finest optics made but take two or three of these in your shoulder bag and you won’t be snapping away for too long before exhaustion sets in.
The other design alternative, of course, dictates smaller sensors which bring with them shorter focal lengths and less bulk. But take that thinking all the way and you get what Panasonic has done with its lens range for its micro-four thirds range of cameras – the G1/GH1 and GF1.
That approach, simply stated, is one of “Get the optics to be as sharp as possible and hang the aberration corrections. Fix all uncorrected defects using software”.
I was thinking how best to illustrate this (the preview of the imported file in Lightroom already has the aberration corrections applied) when it struck me that PTLens has the ability of showing corrected as well as uncorrected images – by comparing JPGs (automatically corrected in Lightroom or Silkypics) with RAW (uncorrected) originals generated in the camera; seconds later I had exported an image taken with the G1 and the 14-45mm kit lens at 17mm (34mm equivalent on full frame) and show the results below. Mouse over the image to see the uncorrected original (Note: The mouse over effect works fine on my Mac with Safari and Google Chrome but not with Firefox or Camino, so please use one of the first two browsers if you have difficulty seeing the images below on a Mac. If you use Windows, please let me know what works so I can post that information here).
The effect of software correction in the Panasonic kit lens at 17mm – mouse over for the uncorrected RAW file.
You can see the remarkable amount of software correction applied quite clearly with software removing severe pincushion distortion. Now these lenses are not as fast as the monsters profiled above, but look at the trade offs in terms of size:
Panasonic 7-14mm f/4: 11 ozs, 3″ x 3″, 21.2 cu. in.
Panasonic 20mm f/1.7: 3.5 ozs, 1″ x 2.5″, 4.9 cu. in.
Panasonic 14-45mm f/3.5-f/5.6: 7 ozs, 3.4″ x 2.4″, 15.4 cu. in.
Panasonic 45-200mm, f/4-5.6: 13 ozs, 4″ x 3″, 28.3 cu. in.
These are enormous differences – even greater when the lower weight of the body is added in – and means that you can carry a G1 and a three zoom lens outfit all day without tiring. Weight of the three zooms with the G1 body? 38.5 ounces. By comparison, a Canon 5D body without lens weighs 31.5 ounces. And your 35mm full frame-equivalent focal length range for the G1 kit is an astounding 14-400mm!
My point here is twofold. First, the future of lens design lies with software, not glass. Second, the only good camera is the one you have with you and I can assure you it’s a whole lot easier to take the G1 and a couple of lenses on a hike than it is to take a full frame DSLR similarly equipped.
For comparison, here’s a snap using the overrated Canon 24-105mm L lens on a 5D body – I say ‘overrated’ because it is a nightmare for architectural photography. The approach adopted by Canon/Adobe Lightroom is to leave the extreme barrel distortion at 24mm uncorrected, necessitating a round trip through PTLens or the like to straighten things up. The imported image in Lightroom shows extreme curvature of lines parallel to the edges at 24mm..
The effect of software correction in the Canon 24-105mm L lens at 24mm – mouse over for the uncorrected RAW file.
Panasonic’s approach is, I believe, the future of lens design and I expect all leading manufacturers to embrace this methodology during the coming decade.
