smags, firgels and queels, again

[scott kirkpatrick]

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Well, one last time. I updated my technical case study on the M8, and provide an explanation of who these creatures might be and the roles they play.

 

NOTE: satire alert! and of course this is science fiction. Any resemblence to real people or organizations is sheer coincidence and unintentional!

 

 

Here's what I think is the real story of what we are seeing.

 

The powerpoint version is at http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~kirk/Electronic_Imaging.ppt .

 

Title: Smags, Firgels, and Queels

 

Summary: (from a classic Robert Sheckley science fiction story): Your job *

pilot a space freighter with a cargo of smags, firgels and queels. Sound easy?

Well, the queels shed steely wool which clogs the ventilators. They need high

gravity to eat or they will starve. High gravity makes the smags shrink and

die, but raising the humidity stabilizes them. Only now the humidity wakes the

firgels from their convenient dormant state, and the result is anything but

convenient.

 

Does that sound at all like engineering and introducing a new product?

Actually, products are harder, since often solving one problem may generate two

new ones. I'll present a case study, the new digital Leica M8, which meets

some interesting physics challenges, trips over equally many others, and

encounters business and marketing issues that 50 years in the Black Forest did

not prepare them for.

 

 

In the science fiction story, the smags, firgels, and queels were extra-terrestrial farm animals. But on Leica's ship, they are passengers and crew. Too few, in fact, so that there is heavy outsourcing needed on the lower decks.

 

The Smags have been with Leica a long time, understand the mystique and where all those wonderful lenses are hiding, longing for a digital camera to be used with, and sit close to the flight deck where they can give strategic direction. They are the ones responsible for the elegant simplification which pares down the filmic controls even further, hiding any digital complexity in reduced menus. Their one accommodation to the digital world is the optical bar coding of lenses, so that the EXIF will have something to say while proclaiming the name of Leica. Their work done, they move on to their true calling, marketing the product. And thinking up deals to totally confuse their channels.

 

The Firgels write firmware. They sit on a middle deck, with no windows, and include a lot of new hires. They write requirements for the outsourced Further Firgels to execute against. They are excited by the opportunity to use their firmware to correct vignetting, now that they know which lens is installed on the camera. Only it slowly dawns on them that they won't know what vignetting to correct until they have working cameras with which to test the wonderful lenses that the Smags have told them about. And they are hearing rumors about red vignetting from the Queels, one level below then on the engine deck. In the meantime, they've been busy, inventing new ways to encode the raw data for rapid visualization, fast DNG-writing, and efficient use of the nonvolatile storage. They tried to explain how clever it all was to the Smags, but no Smag has actually followed their arguments to the end. They've been much too busy conducting extra-vehicular activities, attending trade shows, supporting internationally known photographers, and chatting up celebrities.

 

Down in the heart of the ship, where engines rumble, are the Queels, who have also been with Leica a long time, and instantly strike up a rapport with their brethren at Kodak. I've heard that they all wear brown overalls, but i can't confirm that as I haven't been down there myself. They have found a CCD engine with intergalactic dynamic range. They have reduced its vignetting problems by shifting the pitch of the microlenses so that the outer pixels can look inwards. And they have managed to throw over the side all sorts of performance-robbing filters. They have helped to reduce the possibility of internal reflections by using a non-reflective, thinner, less angle-dependent IR filter, and told the Firgels that this might leave some problems to be sorted out in firmware. A Firgel dutifully wrote this down on the todo list. In their discussion, it was decided that these problems only affected certain fashionable planets.

 

Now it's time to launch...

 

 

(and I wonder how to put the invasion of the blogger beta-testers into this metaphor.)

 

 

scott

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[ho_co]

Scott--

Thanks for bringing us the update. Your analysis of who represents the smags, firgels and queels seems spot on! And the presentation is very nicely done.

 

For example, I especially like seeing the DMR and M8 sensors' characteristics side-by-side. The film vs digital images help us get our feet on the ground. Showing analyses of the eye's and the M8's spectral sensitivities illustrates the IR problem immediately.

 

I do find a couple errors, the first quite important IMHO: Your Leica chronology implies that the three Leicaflex models were made with Minolta's help. Actually it wasn't until the introduction of the R3 that Leica enlisted Minolta's assistance. (Could be corrected by inserting "later" before "with Minolta.")

 

Same page, your label "autoexposure" is tied to M6TTL, s/b M7.

 

Page titled "Role on online forums" seems to be a typo for "Role of...."

 

And if that page represents a timeline, I believe that the streaking was discovered before the IR contamination issue. Pascal Méheut amazed us end of September by writing that he, in Paris, had received the first M8. Only 24 hours later he posted images showing the streaking. (Perhaps different on forums other than this one.)

 

I think that the 'green blobs' ("certain mirrored artifacts") were discovered next, and finally the magenta discoloration; the latter, of course, turned out to have been present but unnoticed even with the test cameras.

 

Really well done presentation. With your attention, the M8 has now become a photographic tool, an educational case, a camera begging for the purchase of newer lenses, and an introduction to Robert Sheckley.

 

--HC

[scott kirkpatrick]

 

I do find a couple errors, the first quite important IMHO: Your Leica chronology implies that the three Leicaflex models were made with Minolta's help. Actually it wasn't until the introduction of the R3 that Leica enlisted Minolta's assistance. (Could be corrected by inserting "later" before "with Minolta.")

 

Same page, your label "autoexposure" is tied to M6TTL, s/b M7.

 

Page titled "Role on online forums" seems to be a typo for "Role of...."

 

And if that page represents a timeline, I believe that the streaking was discovered before the IR contamination issue. Pascal Méheut amazed us end of September by writing that he, in Paris, had received the first M8. Only 24 hours later he posted images showing the streaking. (Perhaps different on forums other than this one.)

 

I think that the 'green blobs' ("certain mirrored artifacts") were discovered next, and finally the magenta discoloration; the latter, of course, turned out to have been present but unnoticed even with the test cameras.

 

Really well done presentation. With your attention, the M8 has now become a photographic tool, an educational case, a camera begging for the purchase of newer lenses, and an introduction to Robert Sheckley.

 

--HC

 

Thanks. I wasn't sure if the "summary" would be considered in bad taste. Robert Sheckley should need no introduction -- he was a journeyman science fiction writer with a gift for nice plots and jokes. I've enjoyed everything I've read of his.

 

I'll fix the typos, but I could use help on the details of the Leica middle period -- SLR's before the R8, and the introduction of first the exposure meter and then aperture priority automation. I wasn't taking photographs (except with a P&S for the family album) during those years. Interesting to me was the fact that Leica was apparently aware of the IR contamination, shared that information with subcontractors -- look at the bizarre profile that Phase One created in order to control the extreme cases -- but gave it the wrong priority. I'll also check to see if I mangled the order in which the pre-fix bugs were exposed. Michael Reichman's supressed parking garage shot may have been as early as Pascal's bleeding streetlights. But that's like (for those who know some cryptography) saying that the British really invented public key encryption, but kept it secret for 25 years because of the Cold War.

 

scott

[ho_co]

Scott--

I don't see any bad taste in the summary, and the order of discovery may not even be that important; the only reason I mentioned it is that you did mention a couple time slots ('first three days,' I think).

 

I can give a little Leica model history, though I don't have the dates:

Leicaflex; later known as Leicaflex Standard and as Leicaflex with external metering

Leicaflex SL--had thru-lens 'selective' metering

Leicaflex SL2--added battery check and illumination of the meter needle

 

The meter of the Leicaflex Standard was built into the prism housing but did not look at the focusing screen; in fact, it was the same meter as the MR-4 clip-on meter for the M4! The Leicaflex Standard had a focusing patch only in the center of the finder, otherwise strictly an aerial image. SL and SL2 added a very finely-ground prism pattern over the full viewfinder screen. (These prisms are so fine that they are almost impossible to see.) These three cameras had the brightest screens in 35mm at the time and may still be unsurpassed. The SL and SL2 also introduced the general camera-buying public to the concept of 'circular polarizers' since they were the first cameras to introduce beamsplitters into the meter. (Technically that's not correct; Contarex also had selective metering but never produced a C-Pol.)

 

But the Leicaflexes didn't sell and Leica got assistance from Minolta, bringing out the

R3--selective and center-weighted metering, and aperture priority for the first time

 

The R3 looked exactly like the recently-discontinued Minolta XE-7. However, the Minolta's prism cap was plastic while Leica's was brass. And if you looked into the mirror box, the two cameras were completely different. Minolta had a foam strip to stop the mirror at the top; Leica didn't because of mechanical mirror damping as on the German models. Leica had a semi-transparent mirror with an additional cell on the floor of the camera for the spot and center-weighted metering. But because of the semi-silvered mirror, the R3 had the dimmest screen Leica ever offered; it was dimmer than a lot of the competition as well.

 

When the R4 appeared, it was not obvious that it was made with Minolta's assistance. It and its successors had a very Leica-ish body that didn't resemble any Minolta camera; and they finally had interchangeable focusing screens that were once again the envy of the market for their brightness.

 

But those are my memories and my pet points, since I worked for Leica at the time.

 

There are a number of Leica SLR history sites on the web, including History of the Leica SLR cameras.

 

--HC