Who wants to bet this or something similar will be in cameras soon?

[runnah]

This 1TB SSD Is Adorably Tiny 

I could see this tech making its way into cameras in the near future what with talk of 50mp cameras and 4k video.

A ssd would eliminate any sort of data bottleneck at the media side of things. Lots of the RED camera and other systems use a swappable ssd for their high sized video recording so it only makes sense.

 

[Light Guru]

Built into cameras NO, attached to a camera YES. You would not want it built in because then you would have to stop everything and copy everything off before you could continue shooting.

You can already attach drives directly to cameras now. Ninja | Atomos
But something like that new drive could make it smaller.

 

[bribrius]

who could afford one? Dont know about you but i am buying twenty dollar sd cards on sale.. And who would possibly need that much room? i am not even filling up 32 cards usually. But 50 , 60 or more mp YES. it means digital would finally have achieved the level of film. Granted it has taken a while..

edit: sorry . missed the video part. yeah. you could use one.

 

[dennybeall]

With the addition of a lens and a tiny extra bit of electronics you could make a very good body camera for law enforcement.

 

[runnah]

who could afford one? Dont know about you but i am buying twenty dollar sd cards on sale.. And who would possibly need that much room? i am not even filling up 32 cards usually. But 50 , 60 or more mp YES. it means digital would finally have achieved the level of film. Granted it has taken a while..

edit: sorry . missed the video part. yeah. you could use one.

I assume you mean the massive film formats not standard 35mm film as that was surpassed ages ago.

Its not only about the size but the speed in which media can be copied. That is why all the 4k camera use SSDs and other people record raw video to them.

 

[photoguy99]

I assume you mean the massive film formats not standard 35mm film as that was surpassed ages ago.

Huh? Any decent low speed consumer film from the 1980s could throw down 100lp/mm, which is about a 5 micron pixel. The best pixel pitch I'm seeing out there in common usage is in the 24M Nikon crop sensors, which gives you a raw pixel size of about 4.2 microns, but after de-mosaicing that's going to turn up more like 6 microns.

It's still plenty of resolution for ordinary usage. Most people using most cameras most of the time could never get near that anyways. Overall system sharpness isn't, generally, all that close to the ideal.

But since the rest of the system parts are pretty much the same, it's fair to compare film to sensors, and sensors, while close, are not quite there.

 

[runnah]

But since the rest of the system parts are pretty much the same, it's fair to compare film to sensors, and sensors, while close, are not quite there.

Poppycock. The quality, range and accuracy of the sensors today is vastly better than film.

 

[photoguy99]

But since the rest of the system parts are pretty much the same, it's fair to compare film to sensors, and sensors, while close, are not quite there.

Poppycock. The quality, range and accuracy of the sensors today is vastly better than film.

I'm not sure what "quality" means here.

"range", yes, digital has several more stops.

"accuracy", do you mean color fidelity? Well, digital is certainly more malleable, which might be the same thing. Both film and digital have massive problems here.

Resolution, the metric that appears to be most salient to storage capacity, and which is therefore what I assume bribrius was talking about, film has more of.

 

[runnah]

But since the rest of the system parts are pretty much the same, it's fair to compare film to sensors, and sensors, while close, are not quite there.

Poppycock. The quality, range and accuracy of the sensors today is vastly better than film.

I'm not sure what "quality" means here.

"range", yes, digital has several more stops.

"accuracy", do you mean color fidelity? Well, digital is certainly more malleable, which might be the same thing. Both film and digital have massive problems here.

Resolution, the metric that appears to be most salient to storage capacity, and which is therefore what I assume bribrius was talking about, film has more of.

Sharpness, and useability.

Massive problems?

I don't know where folks are getting the 40-50mp size from. Everything I've read said it's closer to 20mp. Medium format film is close to the 50mp, not 35mm film.

 

[photoguy99]

The RGB system for faking out colors is essentially flawed, since people vary in their responses to a specific RGB combination. The result is that if I take a picture of an eggplant, the RGB "purples" that result will produce different responses in different people, some of which will be closer or further away from the each person's actual perception of the color of the actual eggplant. Digital certainly makes it easier to get a pretty close approximation of the eggplant without worrying about balancing your light sources and so on, though.

Color film has more color information - by far - than a digital file, but it's not at all clear to me whether it's any better. Tons of information which is wrong isn't really that great, right? My best guess is that - if you've carefully matched your film and your lighting, and if the colors you're interested are in a region where the film performs pretty well, you're getting excellent color information. Otherwise, not so much. But that's just a guess.

(wrong color information isn't WORTHLESS though, as long as it's distinguishing colors from one another - one could correct ones way back to more correct colors, whatever that even means because, once in RGB-land you're stuck in RGB-land)

In terms of resolution:

20mp is generally the number I've seen as well, and that matches my own experience with testing films and lenses. It comes out to about 70lp/mm which is excellent real-world performance (not quite PEAK, mind, but superb in the real world). But, that reflects overall system performance, not the performance of sensor/film in isolation.

Given that the Bayer demosaicing costs you (rule of thumb) about half your pixels, that tells us that the D810 has, as a system, sufficient resolution to compete on resolution with film favorably. Roughly, you're going to run out of other things (lens sharpness, tripod stability, etc etc) before you run out of resolution. Which is pretty much where we were with a good quality ISO100 or lower film in 1992.

So, it's actually quite recent that the resolution issue got put to bed, and you could argue that - for those heroic situations with the 500 pound tripod and the magical lens, and and and, we could stand a few more pixels on a FF body. In practical terms, for the 99.999% case, the 36mp sensor is the end of the line.

In terms of usabiity?

Hell yeah, digital all the way. It's about a million times more convenient and flexible. And since there is no metric in which it is, in real world usage, worse than film, it's a no-brainer winner.

So what the hell was I on about in the first place? In terms of raw resolution of the underlying medium, film still has it.

 

[Overread]

I'm willing to bet if we search hard enough we'll find that when the first 1GB memory cards were coming out this VERY SAME discussion likely happened!

 

[Big Mike]

I still have an 8MB CF card around here somewhere.

 

[Designer]

Is that a "Portable SSD T1" in your pocket, or just a book of matches?

 

[Ilovemycam]

This 1TB SSD Is Adorably Tiny

I could see this tech making its way into cameras in the near future what with talk of 50mp cameras and 4k video.

A ssd would eliminate any sort of data bottleneck at the media side of things. Lots of the RED camera and other systems use a swappable ssd for their high sized video recording so it only makes sense.

Nice, but I like cards. I use them as film.

 

[Overread]

Honestly this probably wouldn't change much - unless megapixels get fixed at a value we will just see the tech advancing with each other with les marked gained in things like processing speed and storage space (though all with a general overall increase).

What would really change the game was if something like this was built into the camera as a fixed component. A built in memory drive of significant size; allowing you to shoot a good few hundred frames without need of an external card. Indeed a light and heavy weight version could be sold (for those who are casual and heavier users). Coupled with a card-back-up so you can expand if needed it would make an interesting change in the market.



Personally I think this is far more interesting for the tablet market