Søk i denne bloggen og Lenker

søndag 17. mars 2013

Mobile Phone and Tablet Photographic Closet.

I feel i have to come out the closet and say i am a bone fide fan of phot'ting with  mobile phones..

Proponents of micro FT in particular often say the best camera you can have is the one you always take with you. That of course is self defeating when a 14-150 (or even the 14-42 )is a chunky lens package even on the smallest two bodies for mFT.

Fixed lens with digital zoom is not just being driven by the size and fast f stops of the prime lenses for the mirrorless MILC cameras, but also by the majority of mobiles having fixed lenses in the eq. 35mm of 28 to 40 mm approx. So let's back up here a minute....no back up and take a photo or walk in and get a portrait.

Mobile devices have for some time superseded stand alone cameras as the means by which the majority of images are taken, and if you take amateur publishing on social media, trad' is in the tiny minority of images up loaded.

This is the real thing; where will your images live?

If a photographer with a Nikon D4s or a LeicaM5 goes into a deep forrest, and takes a technically perfect photo of a leaf, yet never puts it on Flickr, was the photo ever taken?

My images will live on the internet that is sure, with maybe a few being printed out for wall viewing and of course my annual family picture books which my close relatives get.

This christmas for the first time over one in ten shots included in the book design were from my HTC desire.

There was good reason for this; they were good images which captured something special enough to beat hundreds of E450 shots into the album. Also despite warnings from the software about mpg, on reading these books there is actually very litte to say in IQ apart from they are clearly not taken with a DSLR with a fast lens! They are good enough at reading distance and look like good qaulity 5 mpegapixel compact camera images from say six years ago.

The HTC desire I think has a big pinch: the jpeg engine seems to be pure olypmpus- medium hard sharpening, perfect contrast and saturation for facebook eye catching thumbnails, and then of course the Oly skin tones and wonderful blue sky seem to be uncannily integrated there!!!

iPhone 4 / 5 and iPad have really useful cameras and wonderful software such as the quicktime capture and the  panorama stitch with perfect exposure compensation for each image to be stitched.

So now those nice little earners for companies, the 150-250 euro compact cameras and the cheaper end are pretty much dead in the water, especially when more optical zoom lenses are integrated to mobile devices. Cameras with modest zoom ranges and small sensors will basically have to become phones or die. The only survivors will be the higher end hobby and pro/wanna be compact single lens, and they will have wifi and the next generation blue tooth in body, if not actually 4G LTE and a dialer screen.

I expect we will see interchangeable lens system top end mobiles, perhaps with the back-to-the-future film camera style carousel of lenses. Another parallell to that would be to have actually three cameras built in: super wide, eye-magnification (c 65mm) and then 120, each onto a 8 mpx chip and each achieving a crop zoom half way to the next objective. Then it is all solid state and sealed in body, and as you zoom on screen, the entire camera is changed seamlessly.

Another technology will be utilising multiple layer effects to create images previoulsy reserved for DSLR with sub f3 lenses: back ground blur by auto masking two versions of the shot and blurring one, and macro shots  by taking several focus layers and using predictive extrapolation to make sharpness in between layers. These are all do-able with todays quad core processors.

With that type of technology in mobiles and a modest use of megapixels on slightly larger sensors with slightly longer flange-film plane distances, then they eat also into the hobby compact camera market, as in fact they do now: why do I need a compact which is not really pocket size like the XZ2? why pay so much for thexz10 when it has a small sensor?


Ingen kommentarer:

Legg inn en kommentar