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Open Letter to Leica — 10 Ways To Improve the M9 Rangefinder


mboerma

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Traditionally, Germans are far better in engineering anything mechanical than Japan is. So, their product would be better as well.

 

So that's that. Perhaps you can go back to 1950 and tell this to David Douglass Duncan and Horace Bristol.

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So that's that. Perhaps you can go back to 1950 and tell this to David Douglass Duncan and Horace Bristol.

Hi Alan

 

Or 1960 when every one bought Nikon F that were still reliable when hammered with a high speed motor and 250 back.

 

Noel

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To fitter away the time while images are processing ... not one person is going to change their position or opinion even if this thread went to 1,000 pages, and Leica is already pretty much well down the road designing the next M digital, so we'll all just have to wait and see what they did. : -)

 

-Marc

 

Yes we are speculating on small improvements and debating over adding some features from pretty mature technology to "modernize" the Leica. Meanwhile... today, a company in Silicon Valley, is introducing a totally new photographic concept that may make the rangefinder and other focusing systems and traditional lenses irrelevant.

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While this is premature to immediately apply to Leica.... it may be a few years down the line before they might even be able to license this technology. But if you haven't read the announcement about the Lytro camera technology, I think it is worth a read. And also at least scan through Ren Ng's doctoral thesis to see how this works and how it can be utilized. I found it fascinating. Especially the part about the camera and images and the various ways subjects within a scene can be focused.

 

http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf

 

The basic concept can be applied to current camera technology by using a special microlens array just a very small distance in front of the sensor. (The distance is equal to the focal length of the microlenses.) So it should not be too much different to make this kind of sensor than make our current ones. The rest is in the image processing. The implications for Leica is while this is an entirely new way to produce a photograph, it also looks to me as if it would solve the problem of some of the M's lenses regarding producing even color on a sensor. Of course it goes much beyond that.

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Light field photography is a fascinating concept but unfortunately it doesn’t show much progress. When I first wrote about that technology in 2006, Ren Ng had built a 0.09 MP camera based on a 16 MP sensor. A few years later, Adobe managed to increase the resolution to about 0.5 MP using a different design and it seems that Ng’s new camera delivers a similar resolution. Unfortunately it is impossible to catch up with the resolution of conventional cameras when capturing a light field reduces the 2D resolution to roughly the square root of the sensor resolution. Ironically it is the trend towards sensors with a ridiculously large pixel count at the expense of pixel size that gives hope to light field photography – once the sensor outresolves the lens it could still be put to good use in a light field camera.

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Light field photography is a fascinating concept but unfortunately it doesn’t show much progress. When I first wrote about that technology in 2006, Ren Ng had built a 0.09 MP camera based on a 16 MP sensor. A few years later, Adobe managed to increase the resolution to about 0.5 MP using a different design and it seems that Ng’s new camera delivers a similar resolution. Unfortunately it is impossible to catch up with the resolution of conventional cameras when capturing a light field reduces the 2D resolution to roughly the square root of the sensor resolution. Ironically it is the trend towards sensors with a ridiculously large pixel count at the expense of pixel size that gives hope to light field photography – once the sensor outresolves the lens it could still be put to good use in a light field camera.

 

Yes but if a 24x36 sensor was made with just the same pixel density of current p&s cameras, that will give more than enough resolution for good light field photos and yet that same sensor would be overkill for regular lenses. (He writes about the idea of using it with 250 megapixel sensors.) So I think it is just a question of some of the technology and processing power catching up. Consider a small APS format camera with perhaps a 150 megapixel sensor that has a simple zoom lens with no focusing mechanism or diaphragm needed. Yet this camera would have more control over the focus plane of an image than a view camera could accomplish. And it also can control other aspects of focus that no other can can do.

 

Additionally, there may be applications for this in various fields of applied photography that are valuable even at lower resolutions.

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[..] Yet this camera would have more control over the focus plane of an image than a view camera could accomplish. [..].

 

I missed that part of the articles. Does it do swings, shifts and tilts?

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I missed that part of the articles. Does it do swings, shifts and tilts?

It can do all of that and much more. You can have one plane of sharpness in the foreground and another in the background (and blur everywhere else). Or a bokeh with heart-shaped disks of confusion. Remember Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories” where the character played by Allen went all blurry in one scene while all the other people in the room were still in focus? Also quite possible.

 

At least all of that is possible in principle; it would depend on the software which options will be actually available but the light field data set of a shot has everything you need.

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I would rather not have my food chewed for me either.

 

Regards,

 

Bill

 

I think you miss the point that you would have more control over the focus of the image including the plane of focus and other focusing effects, not less. It just would not use our current mechanical methods for focusing but would do it all optically from many tiny images and with software. Perhaps some longer or macro lenses would still have a couple of mechanical focusing positions to give the focusing a greater range.

 

This control could be incorporated into the camera or completely left up to post processing. Sort of like how we can set white balance and contrast for in camera jpegs or do it later on the raw file.

 

If we consider that putting AF into small EVIL cameras and even a Leica M, with current technology depends on contrast detect, a semi-silvered mirror, or phase detection spots built into the sensor, and all of the mechanics of moving a lens, this is much simpler mechanically and much faster.

 

I have no idea how well received the early camera will be as it is targeted at a consumer market that may not appreciate the concept or accept images that are lower res than their current camera has. But this is just the first step in selling a platform for the technology. This really is a new medium and can't simply be compared to what was possible with standard photography.

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Must require small sensors to get wide DoF i guess.

The light field data has no depth of field, rather you can create images with shallow or wide DoF from the same data set. The familiar rules – small sensor/wide DoF, big sensor/shallow DoF – don’t apply here.

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