DSLR Sensor in P&S

Liquid_Thought · May 30, 2004

Petteri Sulonen said:
Petteri Sulonen said:

I'm sorry, but these arguments are simply not making any sense to me.

Click to expand...

Could that be because you're not listening?

It could just be that you aren’t.

Petteri Sulonen said:
Petteri Sulonen said:

With current CCD technology, only so much light can be read at one
single moment in time. It is currently at 70%, so even at 100% it
could not be the same sized CCD as the 2/3 in the 8mp prosumers.
BUT , with future technology, it should be possible to do so.
What if they improve the way that the photo receptors work, so that
like the computer chip, it is 4 times as useful in real estate?
What if they improve the way that light is captured in the first
place with a whole different paradym of thought regarding how that
light is processed?

Click to expand...

You're still missing the point.

Picture a football field. Cover it with buckets. Picture a rainstorm.

The football field is the sensor array. The buckets are the
photoreceptors. The raindrops are the photons. Now, how are you
going to increase the efficiency in which the buckets capture the
raindrops?

Picture a football field with those buckets, only the buckets are twenty feet tall. Oh, now we CAN capture a lot of rain. Not what you meant, but you fail utterly at every turn to think outside the bucket.

Petteri Sulonen said:
Oh, and by the way -- the microchip today is essentially the same
beast it was when it was invented a few decades ago. The
improvement has been evolutionary and incremental. There have been
no paradigm-shifting changes in the way they're designed or
manufactured.

Negative. They have to be designed on the principle of binary, but they have changed greatly. Aluminum to Gold and Platinum. .5micron to .13 micron. I’m sorry sir, but you are sadly mistaken here.

Petteri Sulonen said:
"Algorithms," Liquid.

ACK!!! The English teacher comeback. Goodness, I bet your kids have serious issues understanding you. If you can’t overcome someone with your arrogance, you simply attack their faults in English. GREAT!

Petteri Sulonen said:
A single photon has a single "frequency," no matter what you do
with it. The quantum superposition of states has nothing to do with
it.

Again, you miss the point. The point is that in the future people are going to be designing things that don’t make any sense to you or me right now. Imagine a photographer 25 years ago being told that his camera would be replaced by electronics. You have the foresight of a gnat.

Petteri Sulonen said:
That sounds like a statement of faith, Liquid. By all means keep
it, but don't be surprised if people with more understanding of the
problems involved point out to you that it's not based in reality.

Don’t be surprised when it happens either. Do they grow you people in a place where there is no thought at all? I mean, you make a great deal of sense and know exactly what going to happen Petteri, you’d be a billionaire right? It isn’t that easy. That’s what I’ve been saying. You can’t know what’s going to happen and usually what happens is more spectacular than you thought would happen. You’re not dumb, you’re just naïve’.

Liquid_Thought · May 30, 2004

But again you fail to comprehend. The sensors of the future may not rely on the same technology which you base your physics upon. They might have some strange way ( to us and common to the future ) with which to view the light and capture more of it. The photo sensors we now employ might not be the best material to work with, someone may come up with a far better element or molecule of matter which is better for receiving light in every way. You aren't forward thinking.

Osku said:
alistairsyme said:

The fundamental problem with small imagers isn't the ability
of the sensor to record photons. It's that there aren't enough
photons to record. Sensors will likely to continue to improve
until just about every photon that hits the sensor will be
recorded. Once that happens, it's game over, man. Sensors will
have become as good as they can get. No amount of "thinking
outside the box" or whatever is going to change that. At that
point, either the lens or the sensor has to get larger to get any
improvement, or both.

Click to expand...

Which is exactly what I was trying to explain. If there is no more
photons then you have to have larger sensor area to get more
photons recorded. If you double the sensor size, the actual number
of photons coming from subject doubles too (if the distance from
the sensor to the object absolutely the same).

But sensors of the future can only record almost 100% of the
photons coming to the sensors, that depends again of the lens and
the image ciscle size it produces and so on, and the size (area) of
the sensor.

But if the sensors can at the moment get 70% of the photons, it is
rather hight figure already. The pictures I have seen about some
photodiodes that seem to cover around 20% of the total area of the
sensor, since the borders and wiring are not able to record
anything. But the microlenses do help, and if present sensors are
up to recording 70% the route is even shorter before they can only
improve the light fall off around the corners and use active
cooling (that is used by enthusiasts already in space photography
to reduce noise levels that sensor and ambient heat do produce).

--
Osku

Joseph S Wisniewski · May 30, 2004

Liquid_Thought said:
Petteri Sulonen said:

You're still missing the point.

Picture a football field. Cover it with buckets. Picture a rainstorm.

The football field is the sensor array. The buckets are the
photoreceptors. The raindrops are the photons. Now, how are you
going to increase the efficiency in which the buckets capture the
raindrops?

Click to expand...

Picture a football field with those buckets, only the buckets are
twenty feet tall. Oh, now we CAN capture a lot of rain. Not what
you meant, but you fail utterly at every turn to think outside the
bucket.

Yes, with a 3 month "exposure". With reasonable exposures, you still have just a drop or two in the bottom of a very big bucket.

Liquid_Thought said:
Liquid_Thought said:

Oh, and by the way -- the microchip today is essentially the same
beast it was when it was invented a few decades ago. The
improvement has been evolutionary and incremental. There have been
no paradigm-shifting changes in the way they're designed or
manufactured.

Click to expand...

Negative. They have to be designed on the principle of binary, but
they have changed greatly. Aluminum to Gold and Platinum. .5micron
to .13 micron. I’m sorry sir, but you are sadly mistaken here.

Petteri and I both have semiconductio design experience. He more than I, if I recall correctly. It is you who are mistaken.

Liquid_Thought said:
Liquid_Thought said:

"Algorithms," Liquid.

Click to expand...

ACK!!! The English teacher comeback. Goodness, I bet your kids have
serious issues understanding you. If you can’t overcome someone
with your arrogance, you simply attack their faults in English.
GREAT!
You have the foresight of a gnat.

And you simply attack.

--
A cyberstalker told me not to post anymore...
So I'm posting even more!

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

Liquid_Thought · May 30, 2004

So was lasers in Star Trek. So was the mere idea of a dark room being replaced by photoshop. Science Fiction is exactly what propels technology. First you have to think it up and it is a fiction as it doesn't exist. Then as more and more people become interested in it, money gets thrown at it and whatever was considered weird or impossible suddenly becomes a fact of life.

I want you all to pay close attention to this in your minds. All of you who are saying, it can't be done, blah blah blah. Physics, blah blah blah. And when it does happen, I want you to remember that Liquid Thought was smart enough to see the future and you were all blinded by the mask of technology today. It doesn't matter what today says tomorrow. Someone is going to break the code and learn a new way. You can't stop technology in any electronic device.

It doesn't matter if there are barriers. In computers, the barrier was heat. You simply couldn't cram as many transistors as we have today into a chip without it being a square meter or far larger. It was impossible. They found a way though. Part of that way was simply Moore's Law. They believed in it and that was enough to make them force the equation into a state of truth. Moore didn't have to be right and in fact he should not have been right. But the reason he has been right is because we believed it. Don't you get it? This is all philosophical. If researchers believe it is possible, then it is possible. The speed of sound was considered unreachable, we breached it. We have something like 100 ton nuclear submarines that can stay out at sea without refueling for 15 years. Our telescoped can see 15 billion years into the past.

We're not talking about science fiction, but the beginning of science fact. Look back and see the impossibility of the present, if you are able at all, and then tell me that this future I suggest is unreasonable. In 1980, people were playing Pong man! Now we simulate first person combat and have thousands of people in virtual worlds online on several games at this very moment. I mean, what are you people smoking to be so lax in your ability to imagine a future that circumvents your preconceived notions of barriers?

Olivier GALLEN said:
Liquid_Thought,
When people said (or say) that it is impossible to improve further
the computing power (reduce chip size, increase Mhz, etc...), the
statement is always relative to current technology (there is also
usually the "will have to find another way to deal with it"). The
barrier is only technology.

But in your suggestion, the limit is set by the nature of light
itself: Physics. And you can't do anything about that. The barrier
is very different.

This being said, we don't know what the future will be made of...
(what if the theory is wrong? what if we are able to predict
exactly the behaviour of photon noise? or if we use light and
something else to build the image more effectively, or...etc! But
this is closer to science fiction).

Olivier

Liquid_Thought · May 30, 2004

Keep counting. Eventually the score won't matter when technology brings it about. Good grief you people are annoying. Haven't you a single clue at all? Look back twenty years and think yourself to that place and consider all the things we have and you will see all of them as impossible. Utterly impossible, for the technology of the time. But if you had foresight and could reason out possibility without your preconcieved notions of what current reality was at that time, then you would have been able to see that eventually most people would own a computer and photoshop with digital cameras instead of use film and darkrooms. Get out of the darkroom of you mind-block and realize that technology doesn't realize limitiations; it breaks them at every turn.

Joseph S. Wisniewski said:
Liquid_Thought said:

Petteri Sulonen said:

You're still missing the point.

Picture a football field. Cover it with buckets. Picture a rainstorm.

The football field is the sensor array. The buckets are the
photoreceptors. The raindrops are the photons. Now, how are you
going to increase the efficiency in which the buckets capture the
raindrops?

Click to expand...

Picture a football field with those buckets, only the buckets are
twenty feet tall. Oh, now we CAN capture a lot of rain. Not what
you meant, but you fail utterly at every turn to think outside the
bucket.

Click to expand...

Yes, with a 3 month "exposure". With reasonable exposures, you
still have just a drop or two in the bottom of a very big bucket.

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Oh, and by the way -- the microchip today is essentially the same
beast it was when it was invented a few decades ago. The
improvement has been evolutionary and incremental. There have been
no paradigm-shifting changes in the way they're designed or
manufactured.

Click to expand...

Negative. They have to be designed on the principle of binary, but
they have changed greatly. Aluminum to Gold and Platinum. .5micron
to .13 micron. I’m sorry sir, but you are sadly mistaken here.

Click to expand...

Petteri and I both have semiconductio design experience. He more
than I, if I recall correctly. It is you who are mistaken.

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

"Algorithms," Liquid.

Click to expand...

ACK!!! The English teacher comeback. Goodness, I bet your kids have
serious issues understanding you. If you can’t overcome someone
with your arrogance, you simply attack their faults in English.
GREAT!
You have the foresight of a gnat.

Click to expand...

And you simply attack.

--
A cyberstalker told me not to post anymore...
So I'm posting even more!

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

Osku · May 30, 2004

Liquid_Thought said:
But again you fail to comprehend. The sensors of the future may not
rely on the same technology which you base your physics upon. They
might have some strange way ( to us and common to the future ) with
which to view the light and capture more of it. The photo sensors
we now employ might not be the best material to work with, someone
may come up with a far better element or molecule of matter which
is better for receiving light in every way. You aren't forward
thinking.

You can not record any more light than you do not have. There are no light impifiers you could use, or develop.

Imagine going to a totally dark room. No light, 100% darkens. Add one small candle, and think you are 100m from the light source, in the other end of this big room. All the walls are black, and more than 100m from this candle. The candle transmits a cerrtain amount of light, a certain amount of photons per angle, evenly in all directions (unless the heart of the candle is not symmetrical) around it.

So lets say you are 100m from the object, and a 36x24mm FF sensor receives 18 photons per second from the object. If you have 50% smaller area sensor, you get 9 photons per second. If you double the lens size (area) so that the limiting factor in the lens is double the area it used to be, you get again the same 18 photons per second. But if the light source transmit a certain amount of light (or any other surface reflects a certain amount of light) you can not have any other tricks than the size of the sensor, the light collecting area of the lens, the resultant image size of the lens, and finally the efficiency of the sensor (% of the total sensor area covered with the light measuring electronics, what ever it is). There is and will be no way go around this, ever. If you claim other, you do not understand what you are writing about...

You can have create more accurate measuring per photon, but you can not create a device that would record something that does not excist, and get some result that is more than nothing, that is you are actually recording. No device can be more than 100% efficient. If 10 photons go through the lens, you can never record 11, or your device is mulfuntioning. Period.

--
Osku

Osku · May 30, 2004

--
Osku

Liquid_Thought · May 30, 2004

But let's say that our current technology is incapable of reading they photons completely as is the case. I mean, we see visible light, photons come in all categories. We might have CCDs that can make up the light from out of visual range light.

Or, like a cat, they might not have a problem at all with with the limited photons to create a picture. Even our night-vision military goggles pale in comparison the eye of a cat or a hunter bird.

You aren't thinking outside the box. You have the fact-helmet on and it is eliminating your ability to think foreward. Strictly speaking, you are exactly the type of engineer that can't make the technology happen. You have no imagination.

Osku said:
Liquid_Thought said:

But again you fail to comprehend. The sensors of the future may not
rely on the same technology which you base your physics upon. They
might have some strange way ( to us and common to the future ) with
which to view the light and capture more of it. The photo sensors
we now employ might not be the best material to work with, someone
may come up with a far better element or molecule of matter which
is better for receiving light in every way. You aren't forward
thinking.

Click to expand...

You can not record any more light than you do not have. There are
no light impifiers you could use, or develop.

Imagine going to a totally dark room. No light, 100% darkens. Add
one small candle, and think you are 100m from the light source, in
the other end of this big room. All the walls are black, and more
than 100m from this candle. The candle transmits a cerrtain amount
of light, a certain amount of photons per angle, evenly in all
directions (unless the heart of the candle is not symmetrical)
around it.

So lets say you are 100m from the object, and a 36x24mm FF sensor
receives 18 photons per second from the object. If you have 50%
smaller area sensor, you get 9 photons per second. If you double
the lens size (area) so that the limiting factor in the lens is
double the area it used to be, you get again the same 18 photons
per second. But if the light source transmit a certain amount of
light (or any other surface reflects a certain amount of light) you
can not have any other tricks than the size of the sensor, the
light collecting area of the lens, the resultant image size of the
lens, and finally the efficiency of the sensor (% of the total
sensor area covered with the light measuring electronics, what ever
it is). There is and will be no way go around this, ever. If you
claim other, you do not understand what you are writing about...

You can have create more accurate measuring per photon, but you can
not create a device that would record something that does not
excist, and get some result that is more than nothing, that is you
are actually recording. No device can be more than 100% efficient.
If 10 photons go through the lens, you can never record 11, or your
device is mulfuntioning. Period.

--
Osku

Borstad · May 30, 2004

I guess the problem here is that you are talking about technology and we are talking about the basic building blocks of the universe. We can throw money at the way we deal with problems (lasers, computers and the rest of your examples) but we can't arbitrarily choose the limits that are imposed on us by physics.

Current day computers, for all their amazing impact on or lives, are ubelievably crude devices. Direct lineage back to an some guy using rocks to keep track of his... sheep. It is possible to imagine that we will one day find our that our unifed theory of everything contains loopholes, or perhaps even another sub-level of order that will change the way everything works. Satisfied?

I think that it is too bad for the (thousands?) that are following that this thread that we end up arguing "philosophy" (wildy gesticulating and everything). There is a lot here that is pretty valuable. I thought the sheep amplifier was a valiant effort, and the regular vs 20ft high buckets should have helped (and revealed a distict lack of logic). It's too bad that the "bucket" analogy lacks the physical impact of the sheep analogy (photons er i mean raindrops are too small for some people to take seriously...) but I suggest that next time around we pull them out sooner.

It's finally stopped raining here, and the buckets under the leak need emptying before I blow the highlights again and have to run another load of socks. If I wasn't so sheep I'd get that repaired...

Matthias

Osku · May 30, 2004

Liquid_Thought said:
But let's say that our current technology is incapable of reading
they photons completely as is the case. I mean, we see visible
light, photons come in all categories. We might have CCDs that can
make up the light from out of visual range light.

Or, like a cat, they might not have a problem at all with with the
limited photons to create a picture. Even our night-vision military
goggles pale in comparison the eye of a cat or a hunter bird.

But these animals have limited spectrum at the same time (monochromatic). If you record UV light as some birds, ir IR-light, outside our visible spectrum, you can not make a REAL photograph of it, in the sense that you would record what you have seen yourself... and that is what photography is mostly about, to record what you see.

In scientific approach you can use such data for example if you are trying to identify some detail in a mountain on the surface of Mars (from Earth). Ok, scientific photographs can be seen as art too, but typically not. And all photography does not have to be art too. But when you take photos, you usually do want to record what you see, not what a bird would have seen if it would have been where you were. Do you call x-ray pics of humans photographs? Has it became common to take advantage of x-ray technology in photography? And you would get x-ray pics, not photographs.

But you are right in some respect, and changes might come, even to the laws of physics are re-written from time to time. The dualism of light is a weird thing, and actually great parts of it have not been completely explained, but are based on empirical results, so the theory is based on results, not explained why it would behave as it does.

Liquid_Thought said:
You aren't thinking outside the box. You have the fact-helmet on
and it is eliminating your ability to think foreward. Strictly
speaking, you are exactly the type of engineer that can't make the
technology happen. You have no imagination.

Cool... I am actually a designer, not any type of engineer... (you know, we draw skeches rather than read phone books for relaxing

. And I do always look for new solutions, never been used before, unless there is absolutely no reason to do so, but that is a rare bird. I never use old solutions as presumption, but try to have "tabula rasa", "empty table", to begin with. To find new solutions is so much more fun.

--
Osku

Joseph S Wisniewski · May 30, 2004

Liquid_Thought said:
So was lasers in Star Trek.

That's "phasers". The original pilot used the term "lasers", but Roddenburry realized that lasers were becoming common and they worked nothing like the ray guns in Star Trek, so he picked a different name.

Even science fiction writers know how to separate fantasy from science.

Liquid_Thought said:
So was the mere idea of a dark room
being replaced by photoshop. Science Fiction is exactly what
propels technology. First you have to think it up and it is a
fiction as it doesn't exist. Then as more and more people become
interested in it, money gets thrown at it and whatever was
considered weird or impossible suddenly becomes a fact of life.

I take it you've never actually worked in a company that developes advanced technology. As other have said, it's evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Liquid_Thought said:
I want you all to pay close attention to this in your minds. All of
you who are saying, it can't be done, blah blah blah. Physics, blah
blah blah. And when it does happen, I want you to remember that
Liquid Thought was smart enough to see the future and you were all
blinded by the mask of technology today.

You'll be swept under the carpet, along with that Fredrik guy who hangs around here with his free energy machine and tales of government conspiracies and alien technology.

Except he's funnier. You should take a writing class.

Liquid_Thought said:
It doesn't matter what
today says tomorrow. Someone is going to break the code and learn a
new way. You can't stop technology in any electronic device.

It doesn't matter if there are barriers. In computers, the barrier
was heat. You simply couldn't cram as many transistors as we have
today into a chip without it being a square meter or far larger. It
was impossible. They found a way though.

Again, it was evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Liquid_Thought said:
Part of that way was
simply Moore's Law. They believed in it and that was enough to make
them force the equation into a state of truth. Moore didn't have to
be right and in fact he should not have been right. But the reason
he has been right is because we believed it. Don't you get it? This
is all philosophical. If researchers believe it is possible, then
The speed of sound was considered unreachable,

A common myth. Decades before we evolved aircraft technology that could exceed the speed of sound, we knew how to do it with bullets, and even understood that this was where the crack of a whip came from.

People always like to build up these "cults", saying "everyone said this was imppossible until so and so did it". But it was only the lay people who said it was impossible, the scientific community has pretty much always understood what's going on.

Liquid_Thought said:
We have something like 100 ton nuclear submarines that
can stay out at sea without refueling for 15 years. Our telescoped
can see 15 billion years into the past.

Too more evolutionary examples. Once you have a basic boat or telescope, you can incrementally build bigger ones.

Liquid_Thought said:
We're not talking about science fiction, but the beginning of
science fact.

You're correct. It's not science fiction, because that demands believability. Once again, you're talking trying to exceed the sensitivity that you get by counting individual photons, and that is pure fantasy.

Liquid_Thought said:
Look back and see the impossibility of the present,
if you are able at all, and then tell me that this future I suggest
is unreasonable. In 1980, people were playing Pong man! Now we
simulate first person combat and have thousands of people in
virtual worlds online on several games at this very moment. I mean,
what are you people smoking to be so lax in your ability to imagine
a future that circumvents your preconceived notions of barriers?

Look who's asking people what they're smoking. You're talking magic, departures from the laws of physice, while we're talking predictable evolution within them.

--
A cyberstalker told me not to post anymore...
So I'm posting even more!

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

Joseph S Wisniewski · May 30, 2004

Liquid_Thought said:
Keep counting.

Too much work. So many people scored good solid hits against you, just in the last 2 hours, that it's well over 12:0 against you.

Liquid_Thought said:
Eventually the score won't matter when technology
brings it about. Good grief you people are annoying.

There's this thing called a mirror. It's relatively old technology, but you don't appear to have access. You really need to look in one for a while. All sorts of insights will follow.

Liquid_Thought said:
Haven't you a single clue at all?

Have you?

Liquid_Thought said:
Look back twenty years and think yourself to
that place and consider all the things we have and you will see all
of them as impossible. Utterly impossible, for the technology of
the time.

Actually, as far as computer power, we're pretty much exactly where we should be, according to a technology forecast I did in 1989. That's only 15 years, but so far there's no sign that it won't hold for another 5.

Evolutionary advancements in technology are predictable. Technology forcasting is an acknoledged discipline. I learned it directly from Ted Kiernan, formerly of Bendix Research Labs, while I was at Ford Phase III.

There's even ways of plotting how often particular technologies get stalled in their evolution, and a way of observing what the "miracles" have been in the past that have gotten past the stall points, and of calculating the "frequency of miracles" for a given technology.

The "miracles" do not involve violating the laws of physics, they just involve things like "we can't pack the wells any closer in the memory chip, so lets turn them sideways and let them go deeper". That's a real miracle from our analysis of memory capacity, which has a FOM of about 4.3 years.

Liquid_Thought said:
But if you had foresight and could reason out possibility
without your preconcieved notions of what current reality was at
that time, then you would have been able to see that eventually
most people would own a computer and photoshop with digital cameras
instead of use film and darkrooms. Get out of the darkroom of you
mind-block and realize that technology doesn't realize
limitiations; it breaks them at every turn.

Get out of your own mind-block and realize that the laws of physics always hold, and they change very slowly. You count all the photons, and all the photons are counted. You're done. End of story.

--
A cyberstalker told me not to post anymore...
So I'm posting even more!

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

Joseph S Wisniewski · May 30, 2004

Osku said:
Osku said:

Or, like a cat, they might not have a problem at all with with the
limited photons to create a picture. Even our night-vision military
goggles pale in comparison the eye of a cat or a hunter bird.

Click to expand...

But these animals have limited spectrum at the same time
(monochromatic).

And they have terribly long integration times. It takes a cat several seconds to build up a night scene properly. You can't do it at hand held speeds.

Osku said:
If you record UV light as some birds, ir IR-light,
outside our visible spectrum, you can not make a REAL photograph of
it, in the sense that you would record what you have seen
yourself... and that is what photography is mostly about, to record
what you see.

In scientific approach you can use such data for example if you are
trying to identify some detail in a mountain on the surface of Mars
(from Earth). Ok, scientific photographs can be seen as art too,
but typically not.

Believe it or not, I was out taking UV pictures of dandelions today, with a B+W 403 UV pass filter, an El-nikkor lens, and a Nikon D100.

Check my gallery, photographic abuse of IR and UV light is a favorite of mine.

Osku said:
And all photography does not have to be art too.
But when you take photos, you usually do want to record what you
see, not what a bird would have seen if it would have been where
you were. Do you call x-ray pics of humans photographs?

Radiographs is the term that artistic x-ray shooters use.

Osku said:
Has it
became common to take advantage of x-ray technology in photography?

Would you believe an acquaintance of mine, Albert Richards, shoots "art x-rays" of flowers?

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~agrxray/

He's not the only one...

http://www.xray-art.com/

Some friends of mine tried nude figure photography with a thermograph, but the results wern't impressive. But it was worth a try.

Sometimes, you've just got to live life outside the box.

--
A cyberstalker told me not to post anymore...
So I'm posting even more!

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

Petteri Sulonen · May 30, 2004

Liquid_Thought wrote:
[snip]

Liquid_Thought said:
Picture a football field with those buckets, only the buckets are
twenty feet tall. Oh, now we CAN capture a lot of rain. Not what
you meant, but you fail utterly at every turn to think outside the
bucket.

This would be the analogy of improving the dynamic range of the sensor -- the point at which the buckets overflow is much higher. However, it has absolutely no effect on the efficiency: the buckets still capture raindrops at exactly the same rate as before.

Liquid_Thought said:
Liquid_Thought said:

Oh, and by the way -- the microchip today is essentially the same
beast it was when it was invented a few decades ago. The
improvement has been evolutionary and incremental. There have been
no paradigm-shifting changes in the way they're designed or
manufactured.

Click to expand...

Negative. They have to be designed on the principle of binary, but
they have changed greatly. Aluminum to Gold and Platinum. .5micron
to .13 micron. I’m sorry sir, but you are sadly mistaken here.

These are all small, incremental improvements. Let's go back to the car analogy: these things are similar to the inventions of fuel injection, alloy engine blocks, multiple valve systems, monocoque bodies, and so on. Important developments, to be sure, but hardly whole new paradigms.

[snip]

Liquid_Thought said:
Liquid_Thought said:

A single photon has a single "frequency," no matter what you do
with it. The quantum superposition of states has nothing to do with
it.

Click to expand...

Again, you miss the point. The point is that in the future people
are going to be designing things that don’t make any sense to you
or me right now.

Sometimes I wonder about that, you know. Many of the things we have now would've made complete sense to, say, Leonardo da Vinci. Helicopters, airplanes, parachutes, automobiles -- he had all of these envisioned. The ideas of artificial intelligence were quite imaginable at least 200 years ago (mechanical automata were very much in vogue, so much that people took the possibility of a sarcastic, chess-playing automaton totally seriously).

We have a fairly good understanding of the laws of physics. I'm sure that waking up 200 years from now would be utterly amazing -- but I'm not at all sure that it would be beyond imagination or comprehension.

Liquid_Thought said:
Imagine a photographer 25 years ago being told
that his camera would be replaced by electronics. You have the
foresight of a gnat.

This and similar things have been "predicted" at least since the 1960's. Have you seen "2001: A Space Odyssey?"

Liquid_Thought said:
Liquid_Thought said:

That sounds like a statement of faith, Liquid. By all means keep
it, but don't be surprised if people with more understanding of the
problems involved point out to you that it's not based in reality.

Click to expand...

Don’t be surprised when it happens either. Do they grow you people
in a place where there is no thought at all? I mean, you make a
great deal of sense and know exactly what going to happen Petteri,
you’d be a billionaire right? It isn’t that easy. That’s what I’ve
been saying. You can’t know what’s going to happen and usually what
happens is more spectacular than you thought would happen. You’re
not dumb, you’re just naïve’.

Of course I don't know exactly what's going to happen. I (unlike you) never claimed that. However, I do think I have a handle on the likelihood of certain things happening as opposed to other things -- and IMO your predictions re sensors fall into the "extremely unlikely" category.

Petteri
--

[ http://www.prime-junta.tk ]

Petteri Sulonen · May 30, 2004

Liquid_Thought said:
But let's say that our current technology is incapable of reading
they photons completely as is the case.

The thing is, it is pretty close to reading the photons completely -- the 70% figure Osku mentioned is one I've heard before.

Liquid_Thought said:
I mean, we see visible
light, photons come in all categories. We might have CCDs that can
make up the light from out of visual range light.

We have CCD's that record outside-visual-range light. That's why we have to add hot mirrors and UV filters to our digital cameras: otherwise the IR and UV light would contaminate the picture, and cause the colors to go cuckoo. (Conversely, disabling the hot mirror and adding an IR filter will allow you to do IR photography -- very cool-looking but not at all realistic.)

IOW, by desiging a sensor that'll capture quanta over a much wider range of wavelengths than visual light (which is completely feasible), we'll get a camera that gets a very interesting view of the world -- but a not at all "realistic" one.

The other issue is, of course, that most of the "invisible" quanta that are there to be captured are beyond the red end of the spectrum: infrared, microwaves, radio waves. The ozone layer is rather good at shielding out UV, and the ionosphere and Earth's magnetic field block out shorter wavelengths and particles. IOW, there's not a whole lot there to be captured.

Liquid_Thought said:
Or, like a cat, they might not have a problem at all with with the
limited photons to create a picture. Even our night-vision military
goggles pale in comparison the eye of a cat or a hunter bird.

Source, please?

[snip ad-hom]

Petteri
--

[ http://www.prime-junta.tk ]

synp · May 30, 2004

20 years ago the space shuttle was new technology, which significantly lowered the cost of space launch as compared to the 1960's technology. Some people thought that by the year 2000, the price would continue to drop so that space travel was affordable to the average American. So stuff that people thought would be possible isn't.

Now, since you're so fond of computer examples, let's look at computer example, but not at the 8086 toys:

20 years ago, IBM's leading computer was the S/370-XA mainframe computer. They had a CMOS version which was quite slow, but the best-seller used bipolar chips, which required water cooling and were much faster. If you've seen pictures of room-sized computers, these are the bipolars. All those cabinets really contain water pipes and heat exchangers. The computer itself was always a small, green circuit board.

Anyways, these XA computers could handle 2GB of RAM, and Terabytes of disk space. They were the workhorse of the insurance and banking industry all the way to 2000, although they did go through some changes: ESA in 90 (slight change in machine language), all-CMOS in 94 (no more room-sized), S/390 in 96 (another slight change in machine language) and finally 64 bits in 2004. They could pretty much handle then any task that your PC can handle now, but they cost millions of dollars.

Now let's take the analogy to sensors. If you get a 2/3" sensor to collect 100% of photons, you won't ever get a better 2/3" sensor, but you very well might get cheaper. You might get the angle of acceptance to be wider. You might get the manufacturing process so cheap that full-frame sensors make sense all of a sudden. Maybe someone thinking outside the box can find a process of manufacturing sensors so that 6x6 hasselblads with photosites as small as today's 8MP Sony make sense.

The trend may be towards cheaper, not necessarily towards more efficient.

Liquid_Thought said:
Look back twenty years and think yourself to
that place and consider all the things we have and you will see all
of them as impossible. Utterly impossible, for the technology of
the time. But if you had foresight and could reason out possibility
without your preconcieved notions of what current reality was at
that time, then you would have been able to see that eventually
most people would own a computer and photoshop with digital cameras
instead of use film and darkrooms. Get out of the darkroom of you
mind-block and realize that technology doesn't realize
limitiations; it breaks them at every turn.

Osku · May 30, 2004

Petteri Sulonen said:
This would be the analogy of improving the dynamic range of the
sensor -- the point at which the buckets overflow is much higher.
However, it has absolutely no effect on the efficiency: the buckets
still capture raindrops at exactly the same rate as before.

Actually it would be slower with Liquid´s 20m high ones, since most of the water drops would actually touch the side "walls" and therefore never get to the bottom. Does he really think there is much more water if he climes 20 meters... They would not need an "water tower" at the top of Empire State B if this was true;-)

--
Osku

Petteri Sulonen · May 30, 2004

Osku said:
Petteri Sulonen said:

This would be the analogy of improving the dynamic range of the
sensor -- the point at which the buckets overflow is much higher.
However, it has absolutely no effect on the efficiency: the buckets
still capture raindrops at exactly the same rate as before.

Click to expand...

Actually it would be slower with Liquid´s 20m high ones, since most
of the water drops would actually touch the side "walls" and
therefore never get to the bottom. Does he really think there is
much more water if he climes 20 meters... They would not need an
"water tower" at the top of Empire State B if this was true;-)

I suppose you could always coat the sides of the buckets with Teflon. And make them a tessellating shape for near-100% area coverage.

Somehow, I feel that the analogy is starting to break down, though...

Petteri
--

[ http://www.prime-junta.tk ]

Liquid_Thought · May 30, 2004

LOL! Okay, and when it happens, will the good people of this conversation drop their arrogance and close-mindedness?

Probably not.

More likely, they'll convince themselves that they "knew it all along".

Joseph S. Wisniewski said:
Liquid_Thought said:

Keep counting.

Click to expand...

Too much work. So many people scored good solid hits against you,
just in the last 2 hours, that it's well over 12:0 against you.

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Eventually the score won't matter when technology
brings it about. Good grief you people are annoying.

Click to expand...

There's this thing called a mirror. It's relatively old technology,
but you don't appear to have access. You really need to look in one
for a while. All sorts of insights will follow.

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Haven't you a single clue at all?

Click to expand...

Have you?

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Look back twenty years and think yourself to
that place and consider all the things we have and you will see all
of them as impossible. Utterly impossible, for the technology of
the time.

Click to expand...

Actually, as far as computer power, we're pretty much exactly where
we should be, according to a technology forecast I did in 1989.
That's only 15 years, but so far there's no sign that it won't hold
for another 5.

Evolutionary advancements in technology are predictable. Technology
forcasting is an acknoledged discipline. I learned it directly from
Ted Kiernan, formerly of Bendix Research Labs, while I was at Ford
Phase III.

There's even ways of plotting how often particular technologies get
stalled in their evolution, and a way of observing what the
"miracles" have been in the past that have gotten past the stall
points, and of calculating the "frequency of miracles" for a given
technology.

The "miracles" do not involve violating the laws of physics, they
just involve things like "we can't pack the wells any closer in the
memory chip, so lets turn them sideways and let them go deeper".
That's a real miracle from our analysis of memory capacity, which
has a FOM of about 4.3 years.

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

But if you had foresight and could reason out possibility
without your preconcieved notions of what current reality was at
that time, then you would have been able to see that eventually
most people would own a computer and photoshop with digital cameras
instead of use film and darkrooms. Get out of the darkroom of you
mind-block and realize that technology doesn't realize
limitiations; it breaks them at every turn.

Click to expand...

Get out of your own mind-block and realize that the laws of physics
always hold, and they change very slowly. You count all the
photons, and all the photons are counted. You're done. End of story.

--
A cyberstalker told me not to post anymore...
So I'm posting even more!

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

Liquid_Thought · May 30, 2004

Great. Well debates often wrap into circles. Here come the English teacher cracks. GOOD GAME!

Joseph S. Wisniewski said:
That's "phasers". The original pilot used the term "lasers", but
Roddenburry realized that lasers were becoming common and they
worked nothing like the ray guns in Star Trek, so he picked a
different name.

Again, it was evolutionary, not revolutionary.

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