On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 20:15:43 +0100, dennis@home wrote:
On 26/07/2015 19:56, wrote:
On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 7:29:49 PM UTC+1, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , Johnny B Good
wrote:
TBH, I'm disappointed that no enterprising company has come up with a
digital 'film back' adapter kit to revitalise pretty well just about
every film SLR camera that's ever existed.
Why would anyone bother?
--
"I love the way that Microsoft follows standards.
In much the same manner as fish follow migrating caribou."
- Paul Tomblin, ASR
Like he said. I do recall a startup company about a decade ago
proposing to do this, but unsurprisingly the idea went nowhere - indeed
there's an article on it over on dpreview:-
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/480...blogger-looks-
back-at-the-failure-of-the-silicon-film-project
Quote
The lack of battery space, the need to open the camera to change ISO,
White Balance or any other image setting,
etouQ.
Have these people never heard of bluetooth and phone apps to control the
insert?
And, that's just the start of a long list of developments which make
techniques considered too complex (DSP of the camera's shutter/wind on
mechanism noises, including ultrasonics to control a basic frame capture
task, possibly including detecting iso metering settings for some models)
just a decade ago a much more viable proposition today.
The die shrinks mean that most of the 'Film Canister' body can house a
decent watt hour LiPO battery to allow thousands of 50Mpxel RAW image
stills to be recorded on a tiny fingernail sized 32/64GB flash ram card,
notwhithstanding that the camera's own frame counter 'end stops' at 42 or
so frames.
As for bluetooth/WiFi, there may be a problem in regard of the screening
of these signals in spite of mounting a 'module' on the back or side of
the camera body itself to keep the range to an absolute minimum. However,
I deliberately used the word "kit" in this context to get around the
'obvious issues' with the 'drop-in-digital-cartridge' concept that
everyone seems so fixated upon.
I'm sure a lot of such objections will, if not entirely disappear, be
relegated to 'minor downsides' if such digitisation kits are presented in
the same form as the classic 'Polaroid Backs' of yore. The kits can be
sold in two forms whereby a complete 'digital back' replaces the existing
film back as a straight swap out option and a more customisable form
whereby the buyer can do a DIY conversion of his existing film back using
a kit of parts designed to create such a conversion (along with a modicum
of drilling and filing of metalwork required to execute the adaptation).
Anybody wishing to create an SLR digital conversion kit would be wise
not to bother with anything less than a full frame sensor, even if it
means using much larger pixels to keep the count down to a more
manageable 8 to 12 Mpxels whereby the gain becomes one of low noise at
high ISO ratings (imagine an 8Mpxel sensor set to 12800 ISO no more noisy
than a 12Mpx P&S at 80 ISO!).
Even the concept of a drop-in 'digital film canister' has its merit but
only when full frame sensors become more commoditised. The whole concept
rests on the full frame sensor being used. Anything smaller is guaranteed
to be a non-starter in this market, such as it is.
We may have to wait a few more years yet before this can become a
reality. I suspect the market for such kits or devices is probably a lot
larger than one might suppose by the lack of use of old fashioned film
SLR cameras.
Just because keen amateur and semi professional and professional
photographers have been forced to 'move over to the digital side',
doesn't mean they've thrown all those expensive and lovingly crafted SLR
camera bodies away. It's very easy to consider that more such kit is
simply gathering dust in an attic storage box (or wherever such heirlooms
are kept) than have gone to land-fill.
Admittedly, the nay-sayers do have a very good point when they suggest
that rather than spend a lot of good money trying to revive an excellent
film SLR and lens kit when you can achieve "So Much More" with a modern
mass produced commoditised DSLR.
However, only by virtue of the fact that digitisation of photography has
merely widened the market to include a class of non-photographer consumer
which swamps the relatively smaller number of photographers with a clue
who would really appreciate the real benefit of digital improvement to
the quality of their work rather than the digital benefit to the 'bottom
line of the manufacturers concerned, many of whom have no right to be in
the business of photography at all (cough-Sony!).
It would be nice to see the power of digital being used for Good rather
than, as seems the case today, for Evil. Such digital camera backs would
a nice example of such a 'turn around', imho. :-)
--
Johnny B Good