Do you think technology will advance enough for... (low light; noise reduction)

[JerryPH]

I have to say that I do not agree at all with this sort of talk. There is certainly a huge gap between consumer-level technology and lab technology but that gap cannot be explained by strategic marketing. All computing industries are governed by the capabilities of their hardware and it would be folly for hardware designers to not release market-ready equipment to the end users.

Rather, this equipment is simply not ready for large scale use.

I disagree, and if I did not have a non-disclosure clause with my name on it, I could easily prove it.

Everyone *knows* that it takes more than a year to design and manufacture a single automobile... hell they prepare the manufacturing line a MINIMUM of *2* years in advance for coming lines of cars (3 years in advance if you are Honda, Hyundai or Kia).

They do that so that the "current" year cars are ready and in production on the September of the YEAR BEFORE their year of designation (ie 2010 production cars are already being mass produced in September 2009)!

Now how could they possibly do this if the designs were not already ratified and finalized YEARS in advance? They could not. I have had access to insider info on the Chevrolet "Blue Devil" Z06 Corvette since 2002... strange that it is just next year (2010) released! That's 8 years of knowing the EXACT detail of the car... from HP output, to final looks, available colours... everything. How is that possible if it was not finalized YEARS ago? It could not be.

Trust me, camera companies are already working not one generation ahead, but a *minimum* of 2-4 generations ahead. Intel has a 10 generation line all ready to release and go into production tomorrow if it was financially worth it for them to do... obviously, its not, so they don't do it. Keep them stringing along, its the financially SMART thing to do!

Its not a very smart company that doesn't think ahead... but not to worry, these companies last about 1-2 generations of their product before going bankrupt, thats why you don't see many of them in the first place.

 

[JerryPH]

These companies spend tons of money in R&D to bring these products to fruition and, if they are market-ready, they will certainly be available at some price.

Trust me, nothing that is market ready is realeased immediately unless it is the first year of that company's existance. Everything after that is a loooooong well through out process and the high tech industries are the ones with a nice deep closet of goodies all ready for us years in advance. They know exactly how to pull that last penny out of our pockets... or they die, so they play the game VERY well.

Intel will NOT release one generation faster than planned, ready or not, it is financial suicide. They are also working very closely with partners like Microsoft, to always maintain a balance. Ever wonder why it always takes about the same amount of time to boot a computer or an application TODAY that it did 12-15 years ago? You would HOPE that a XT computer would be slower to boot than a quad core, wouldn't you? Do the test... and then tell me also why in the "old days" we needed 250k to have an operating system vs the minimum hardware requirements of 20 GIG for Windows Vista's operating systen requirements!

People see this every day of their lives in almost anything marketed... I am continually surprised that people cannot see the truth of the matter. Microsoft are masters at pulling the public by the nose an inch at a time. Remember the famous Windows NT5? I had a copy of that on my computer back in 1989... so why was it released as Windows 2000 in 2001?

I have examples after examples that prove this.

 

[Phranquey]

These companies spend tons of money in R&D to bring these products to fruition and, if they are market-ready, they will certainly be available at some price.

I'll have to go with Jerry on this one. It's not just the technology industry, I see happen a LOT in the construction arena as well. Most of the time, leaps in technology are just that...LEAPS. Then the industries figure out how to release those leaps in increments for the people/companies who want the best in everything, so they are constantly buying the best of what comes out.

What do you think makes a surveying instrument company more money....releasing the GPS unit that is accurate to .001' for $50,000, or come out with increments to that end for $30,000 each over 3 or 4 steps.

 

[bjorkfiend]

...

 

[rufus5150]

The feasibility, market and technology were there before the first iPhone was released to have a 3G, bluetooth, large SSD iPhone and don't think for a minute otherwise that the rollout was 95.234% marketting based. There are very few industries (my background is in technology publishing, it's horrid there) where the lastest-and-greatest, even if fiscally viable, will be in the public hands.

They're damned good at creating the perception that it is, though.

 

[bjorkfiend]

...

 

[rufus5150]

No, only about 8 in the case of the iPhone, but it's not terribly short either.

 

[AlexColeman]

It all boils down to how much more money they can make by spreading it out over 2x the releases, and 4x the total profit.

 

[bjorkfiend]

...

 

[djacobox372]

hmm I don't know about the MPs though - at the moment the camera sensors of 20MP (and less) are outresolving current lenses - so I think a cap will be the advance of lens technologies - which is considerably slower than the advance of digital cameras.
This might be a good thing for us as it should force camera makers to look at other things to improve on the cameras whilst they update lenses - like getting more dynamic range and better high ISO values (without losing sharpness).

That's a bit misleading--while true that 20mp is pushing the envelope on lens resolution AT 35MM, but a cheapo medium format film camera with a 50yo lens can squeeze out much more detail than a 24mp d3x.

The next evolutionary step of photography = cameras capable of shooting 1000+ photos per second, allowing hdr processing to be done in camera with hand-held shots.

 

[rufus5150]

8 years is a pretty long time in the world of technology. What do you think Apple was waiting for in their release? Was the 3G infrastructure in place that whole time?

Since the 3G variant of the iPhone showed itself only a year after the initial version was released this would mean that you're saying that Apple was sitting on a completed, market ready 3G version 7 years prior to the release of the non-3G version? Since Apple had no other cellular solution to milk prior to the iPhone's release it doesn't make much sense that this decision was purely based on marketing.

I don't mean to be combantant; I'd sincerely like to know what they were thinking if that is true.

The technology at that size was available. The 3G network was small, the price point would have been higher but they'd have turned a profit even with a teeny network. If they were really smart they would have either rolled out the 3G first or wait a few years so as not to tick off their customers. It's quite at the outer extents, but they had the ball rolling on that many years before it was released.

Obviously they waited so they could not just enter the market, but to conquer it and take over the world! *evillaugh*

 

[rufus5150]

allowing hdr processing to be done in camera with hand-held shots

I can't wait for the day... SOOC purists are going to explode in little tiny puffs of logic.

 

[skieur]

hmm I don't know about the MPs though - at the moment the camera sensors of 20MP (and less) are outresolving current lenses - so I think a cap will be the advance of lens technologies - which is considerably slower than the advance of digital cameras.
This might be a good thing for us as it should force camera makers to look at other things to improve on the cameras whilst they update lenses - like getting more dynamic range and better high ISO values (without losing sharpness).

They did however develop a gigapixel camera chip last year, so the pixel wars will continue. Obviously lens design will need to be more innovative to benefit from the pixel wars.

skieur

 

[JerryPH]

I'm not sure what you are intending to say here so I will only say that, though computer performance has increased dramatically in the last 15 years, software requirements are always one step ahead. Install CS4 on that XT machine and I think the performance increase should be apparent.

I find it interesting that I am a software developer by trade yet I have to come to a photography forum to argue about technology. Thanks folks!

Computer performance HAS drastically improved, what I am saying is that software has also equally ballooned and slowed down the performance to keep the balance. I doubt you will get CS4 to run on an XT machine becuase they usually maxed out at speeds about 500 times slower than that of the latest speed demons and had the ability to support at most a massive 640K of memory (no typo)... so suffice to say, your CS4 won't even LOAD much less run on XT type machines, I won't even mention that this was the day where there was NO mouse support and no operating systems that even used a mouse, becuase everything was command-line oriented.

My point was that the time to do similar tasks 15 years ago vs today is the same. It still takes 2 minutes to boot a PC, it takes MUCH LONGER today to turn off a PC, it still takes 5-10 seconds to load a word processing application and it still takes 5 seconds to send a 5-page print job to a printer. These are approximates, of course, but this is the point I was making. Where are the improvements you speak of?

In all that time, all we have REALLY improved is the interface. Wow, what progress (if you really want to call Vista's AERO interface "progress").

The day I need to increase RAM from 1 gig to 2 gig, increase GPU RAM from 32mb to 128 (MINIMUM, 256 suggested) and increase hard drive space used by the operating system from 5 gig to 20gig, increase processor speed 25% (without AERO, make that 35% if AERO is used)... JUST TO MATCH THE PERFORMANCE of the older system, you know there is something obviously wrong. I am now, in the last paragraph talking only about the differences between Windows XP and Windows Vista. On top of that, 90% of my client's 2 year or older custom applications, DO NOT RUN under Vista (but just fly under XP).

Again... wow, what progress.

If you are a software developer, you will know that Vista will not reliably run custom complex applications that are coded using .NET 1, 1.1 or .NET 2. Ever wonder why there wasn't much if any backwards compatibility there? Becuase they knew Vista was coming and that they would be forced to pay for newer, more complex, slower, more demanding applications... and that the customers would be forced to purchase them... again.

See the vicious ring a little clearer now?

 

[JerryPH]

I can't wait for the day... SOOC purists are going to explode in little tiny puffs of logic.

ROFL... in that sense, this aspect never changes. We're all going to be "that old stuffy photographer that wants to do things the OLD WAY..." one day ourselves.