On of my passion’s is starlight photography.
One of the main bugbears about this passion is the lack of any camera manufacturer that feels the same way……
They spend their life, rather than making nice quality cameras that can capture beautiful low light images, they rather pump the numbers and sell a camera with big sounding numbers in the hope that zillions of consumers will buy it because, well, after all, it has the biggest number of X.
In English.
Digital cameras are made up of sensors. The sensors are like little buckets.
They capture light and fill up their buckets.
If the bucket gets full before its emptied, things look pretty bad.
If the bucket is not full before it gets emptied, things look pretty bad.
In the first case, things are blown out, white, overexposed and flares and gunk.
In the latter case there is not enough light in the bucket, so the camera software makes up what it thinks should be in the bucket and always gets it wrong, so we end up with computer noise.
The latter is my issue. When photographing stars there is never enough light, and so I am always fighting with the camera and software trying to reduce the noise.
The big numbers come from the number of buckets…..
See the more buckets there are, the ‘better’ the camera, or so thinks Mr Camera maker. He can boast that he has more buckets than the other guy.
The trouble with this is that to fit so many buckets into the camera, the mouth of each bucket has to be tiny. So they just can not collect that much light.
Apple (of all people) are one of the very very very very very very very few ‘camera’ makers that understand this.
They have pretty much frozen their phone cameras at 8 million buckets.
When everyone else is pressing upwards of 20 million buckets on their phone cameras, they get that bigger buckets means better photos…. They also have enough of a rabid fan base that they can sell phones with a ‘small’ number of buckets.
(The other important thing is the lens / glass quality and so each Apple phone has better quality glass and this really helps them as well).
The latest Apple phone (the 6) has one of the best cell phone cameras ever.
(Mind blowing Nexus 6 camera software aside).
So, now, perhaps, you have some idea why I was so excited to read this;
http://www.eoshd.com/2014/11/huge-sony-sensor-advance-heralds-amazing-video-features-6k-1080p-16000fps/
Sony Active Pixel Color Sampling is coming. The new technology solves low light performance issues with global shutter sensors, makes ultra high frame rates possible and scraps the traditional bayer RGB filter altogether.
The 1.5″ sensor records 6K video (6144 x 2160 according to the leak at Chinese site CNBeta via Image Sensors World) and only requires 4.85MP, meaning the pixels themselves are massive – almost 10 µm in width compares to 8.4 µm for the Sony A7S, 5.2 µm for the 5D Mark III. However unlike the traditionally square photosites on bayer sensors, the Sony APCS pixels are rectangular, measuring 9.78 x 4.89 µm (micrometers).
I could care less about the video and high speed video, but oohhh, the size of those buckets!!!!!
At last we see a sensor that breaks the pattern of ‘if a little is good, then more must be better’.
I am also rather excited about the fact that they are moving away from the usual square bucket to a rectangular one.
Lastly, they have removed one of the filters between the starlight and the sensor. This is pleasing news to a baldgeeks eyes.
Cant wait for this sensor to get in a camera and see some sample images from it.
