5 mp CCD wrong? (long)

[SFJP]

Hi Tuan,

You are back from your trip? I did not expect to ear from you until the beginning of next year. Did you get your super digital wallet?

You might be right in what you say in your message, in fact it is Fuji argument that the Honeycomb pattern helsp in enhancing the (optical) resolution in the horizontal and vertical direction, not the diagonal.

Anyway, did you see the sample tests made with the Nikon 5000? No more convincing than the D7 in my view, even less. The 6900 and the 707 remains the two main contenders in the category of the prosumer digicams (if we exclude the more costly E20 and of course D30, S1, etc), with my preference to the 6900 for the reasons I explained in this thread in spite of the fact the Sony has a better EVF and more night shots ability.

Jean-Paul

You are both right in your own arguments, but you have forgotten
that the structure of the super CCD is different and this has a
significant implication.

Let me give one example. If you stack conventional pixels on top of
each other, as is conventional, then the smallest resolution is
indeed one pixel wide, but if the pixel are stacked in a honeycomb
pattern such as in the super CCD then in some case it is possible
to have a resolution that is at least half the pixel's width if one
can examine several "tips" of the pixels adjacent and deduct
whether the line is half the width of the pixel or full, thus we
have effectively doubled the resolution. Granted this is only
happening at certain angle and thus it explains the middling
resolution of the Super CCD, i.e. above its 3.3M but under its 6M
(as JP said about 5?)

In other word the structure of the CCD allow Fuji to utilise the
triangular half of the square CCD in some condition and effectively
doubled the resolution.

I am not sure if the explanation is clear enough, I think it needs
a drawing.

Cool down! You're in computer industry like me and you should know
that the amount of real nformation is not proportional to the
amount of bits that may be used to store it but to the minimal
amount of necessary bits that should be used exploiting, which
exploiting some pattern regularity in information can be quite
lower than expected in many cases. To take an example, If we'd
follow your reasoning (?), a 1:8 jpeg compression should give 8
times less information and resolution than an original uncompressed
image, which is quite not the case usually. So, what's wrong in
supposing that the honeycomb pattern of physical pixels used by
Sony superCCD can, in most cases, allow to infer correctly an image
with significantly more horiaontal rows of pixels? In fact, the
superCCD may be viewed in this perspective as a kind of natural
hardware compression device that can store more information on 3
mega physical pixels, because of their geometric arrangement, than
others using simply horzontal rows of physical pixels. This can be
true or false, but there would be nothing shocking in this. My
experience with the Fuji 6900 is that in many cases of pictures
this is true to a certain extent, and the pictures extracted from
the 3.3 mp superCCD can motr than often (but not always) bear the
same amount of details and resolution that those coming from a 4-5
mp, sometimes 6 mp, conventional CCD. Who's the fool?? I guess by
your first name you may be French like me, so in this case clear we
are two fools!!

Take for instance the picture examples of the blue little boat in
dry dock that Phil took with the Fuji 6900, the Nikon D1x and the
Kodak DCS 760 with apparently similar light conditions: download
them in full 6 mp size, forget from which camera they respectively
come and tell me if you can see a great difference between them in
term of resolution and overall quality...

Jean-Paul
http://www.pbase.com/sfjp

Hi SFJP,

In the first reply I tried to be nice and have some understanding,
but now have to write:

you are a fool, just a fool and nothing more or less.

Just go to you bank, give them 2 USD and asked, no demand you are
going to get 1,000,000 bucks as they have to use a SuperCCD.

jacques

 

[tranworld]

Hi JP,

Yes just got back last night, but only for a few days, holidays by Friday hence the franctic search for storage!

Well to start it is called the Terapin Mine, I know the designer and I think it is the best thing at the moment on the market, however the price is high, again if you simply look at the $ Mb then it would skew your judgment, in fact even for barebone hard disk the prices are different by a lot, so if we all simplistically compare at the lowest common denominator then we would be fooling ourselves. In the end I did not have sufficient time to find the device, it is in short supply and I was on business.

I did however bought another 1G microdrive, my reasonning is as follow. We are comparing a barebone drive with another more sophisticated devices and this is wrong, the CF will always win on convenience, the other always on capabilities, thus the two should coexist peacefully to allow us photographer to concentrate on the photo itself, the lighting, composition etc. The current price of microdrive make it alsmost a short use device, dare I say disposable ?

Let's do the math, I bought the 1G at US$270 in Singapore (S$495), that's about the price of a dozen rolls of film bought, exposed and developed, i.e. one holiday worth of ONE USE film.

So if I considered it as a device for convenience then it will always win, it does not precluded me from buying the "insurance" i.e. the Mine/Digital Wallet etc. to save the photos for safe keeping and to free up more space, not that I think I can fillup 2G per holiday! Perhaps as a mean to free us from buying many type of camera, using many other type of storage.

On a $ Mb comparison then perhaps it (1G) does not stand against the digital wallet approach, but if you bear in mind that unless you are going to fill it, it is empty space that we are considering and if we put a weightage in terms of convenience then 1G win.

Then if we have freed ourselves of further chargers and support devices then we could better utilise that space, assuming that there is a limit to the amount of gear we wish to take on holiday, for additional lenses and flashes? Now these are the REAL and technologically unsurmountable limits currently. A fast lens will always be big, long lenses will be long and good flash will be large as we have not bend the law of quantum physics yet.

So it is a long way round to say that I am still looking for a Mine Terapin once I can spot one for sale, but 2G should be sufficient for me for now.

Now if only Canon has a G2 with Super CCD and 10x zoom ? Yooohooo

On another note, my 1G microdrive seems to have problem being recognised under WIN ME (WIN98 works fine), the IBM website only have reference and driver for 98, do you know of a way to make it work under WIN ME ?

Cheers