GRD and bigger sensor

[odklizec]

According of this article Ricoh engineers decided between the 1/1.8", 2/3" and APS-C sized sensors. But they have quickly realized, that the camera would become extremely large even with 2/3" sensor. As they want to keep the camera as small as possible and with bright wide angle lens, they finally decided to go with 1/1.8" sensor (during the test phase there were some test units both 2/3" and 1/1.8" sensors!).

PS: this is also the reason why I think the GRD II (or whatever it would be called) will have the same 1/1.7" sensor as used in the GX100. If they want to keep the GRD successor in the same dimensions as original GRD, they will have to use the same sized sensor. This is also the reason why the mythic Sigma DP1 starts at F4.

 

[luis patricio]

F4 is too slow ... Sacrifice the speed and quality of the lens to introduce a bigger sensor .... is the wrong way!!!
The lens is the "core" of any camera!

 

[luis patricio]

My first digital camera was one canon G5 (i needed a camera for quick work shots), a money wastefulness and a nightmare experience for who was accustomed to 35 and 120mm film cameras! In that time i thought for myself, i could have bought 8 Lomos ... :lol:

I passed some years looking at the friends experience and results with all kinds of digital cameras/lens, sasonal "Mpixel" brand wars, etc... Meanwhile i closed the BW darkroom during that time and adopted a kind of anolog/digitalscan&print process method. I dont really like to watch photos on a monitor, i like to print them, to touch them, to see them in a wall in the ceiling or or in the floor!!!

I passed some years looking at many steril and unatural shots taken with some cheap and expensive digital cameras ...
Then GRD was launched by Ricoh i saw some printed works and i really liked the results, especially the "GRAIN" in BW, i did not buy one because i had/have one GR1s so i waited for something diferent, small and more versatile (zoom & raw speed) from ricoh, a pocket dslr .... The GX100!!! I call the portuguese importer as soon as ricoh launched gx100 in europe, they were unaware of the model, but the order was done ... it was a shot in the dark .... but now im really amazed and satisfied with the capacities and results (prints) of this small digital camera even with its known limitations!

As you see i dont really have a long experience with digital cams but in my opinion the "Grain" is an essential ingredient in photography, so the question is:
What will we get from a bigger sensor??? More dynamic range and detail???? Less grain/noise????

PS - English is not my native language so, sorry for the errors.

 

[odklizec]

The bigger sensor should (theoretically) bring us less high ISO noise, higher dynamic range, better "per pixel" details, less image distortion but also the ability to play with shallow DoF. I said theoretically, because my friend's Sony R1 uses large APS-C sensor and the high ISO noise performance is not any better or even equal to Canon's APS-C sensors or even Olympus 4/3 sensors! However, the dynamic range is higher than seen in most P&S cameras and the ability to play with shallow background is definitely there. The crop factor of APS-C sensor is 1,6 while the crop factor of typical 1/1.8 sensor is 5.

In other words, the blurred background produced by F2.8 lens on APS-C camera is like F4.5 on full frame 35mm camera. But F2.8 on typical P&S with 1/1.8 sensor is like F14 on full frame. There is a great article about DoF at wrotniak.com
http://www.wrotniak.com/photo/tech/dof.html

I'm sure, many people would be very happy with the ability to play with blurred background in P&S cameras. Maybe even more than to have less noise in their pics. At least I would be verry happy with that And this is where the DP1 will most probably fail. 28mm at F4 will not allow too much background smoothing. Yes, almost two times better that 2.4 on GX100, but on the other hand, it's still not enough.

 

[luis patricio]

I'm sure, many people would be very happy with the ability to play with blurred background in P&S cameras. Maybe even more than to have less noise in their pics. At least I would be verry happy with that

We can use the macro mode to play with the DoF, its a limited option but its what we can get in the pocket!

 

[lambsporriegetta]

why is it so difficult to get the camera compact? dslr cameras use the same size lenses as their film counterparts, so if the original gr cameras used a lens of certain physical dimentions, why can't they use up to 35mm frame cmos sensors with the same lenses?
I know lenses have a resolution issue with digital cameras, but you catch my drift?

 

[odklizec]

DSLRs can use the same lenses as film cameras, but they have smaller APSC sensors..smaller than full frame film. Sure, you can use the film lenses also with full-frame dslr, but there is usually a problem with lens vignetting (black corners). I'm using full frame lenses with my 4/3 DSLR and there is no evidence of black cornering. The old film lenses are actually better in this than the newly designed lenses, full of electronic and plastic parts

It's just easier to design large lens for smaller sensor than to design small and compact lens for large sensor. And this is also the problem of DP1. Sigma managed to build very compact camera with large apsc sensor. But the reason why the lens is so slow is the lens size. I'm sure, they could allow also the f2.8, but then the result images will suffer from bad vignetting and probably also bad corner distortion.

 

[lambsporriegetta]

Vignetting comes from the image circle projected by the lens being close to the edge of the film/sensor and has always been an issue with lens design. i'm not sure that this would affect sensors in any way different from film. As for lens distortion, i do understand this issue, the light is on such an oblique angle to the sensor that the quality of the image is quite poor. We use Canon 1ds camera's at work with a full frame sensor, and use the same lenses that we used when we used the eos1 film camera. Admittedly some of the wide angle lenses are pretty bad around the edges (as they were with film) but all others are fine. Canon did a 16-35mm lens a couple of year ago that got a lot of complaints due to the distortion at the edges, and have recently released a mk2 that is supposed to be much better. It's a bit bigger but not huge. So I'm assuming that the manufacturers are in the case of the GRD (and sigma dp1) keen to ensure lens detail is as good as it can be, and rightly so.
Personally I like a bit of vignetting, and often put it into images just to draw focus into the centre of the frame, so that issue would be fine to compromise on in my opinion, the distortion is I agree a problem though, but when weighed up against the image noise from small sensors, one that i would be willing to lose out on a little just to get a better RAW file in terms of noise. (on a side note, I don't mind luminosity noise, but the patchy colour noise is unbearable. This I think i'm right in saying would be reduced with a larger sensor. Seems a lot of folk Particularly like the GRD noise, especially in mono pics.)
I have to admit i'm keen to see how the DP1 raw files look when it's released.

 

[Kamil]

I'm not sure, if this was already mentioned in another way, but the main difference between film and digital sensors is the sensitivity to light rays which are hitting the film/sensor at an oblique angle, different from 90 degrees to the film/sensor plane. Film is relatively tolerant to this kind of rays which mainly appear in the corners, far from the middle of the picture. That's why even such compact kameras as the GR1 were able to use 35mm format. A digital sensor reacts very critical to this kind of rays. Because of limited time I only found this article, where you can find a few sentences about "pixel vignetting":
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Canon-Lenses/Canon-Lens-Vignetting.aspx

The difference between SLR cameras and compact cameras is the distance between the last lens element and the film/sensor. Especially with wide angle lenses, the light is hitting the film/sensor very flat in the corners and the smaller the distance from the last lens element to the sensor/film, the bigger the difference from a 90 degrees angle.

This was also one of the problems, designing the Leica M8, where the distance from the lens to the sensor is smaller than in DSLR cameras. So they put micro lenses onto the sensor surface to change the direction of the light right before hitting the sensor, but even with that kind of technology, they equipped the new M-lenses with a code that tells the camera to balance vignetting by software, according to the lens, attached. I don't know if micro lensing was used in the Epson RD-1, but as you can see in the following review, the vignetting problem is really significant with rangefinder cameras.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/lenses/rd-1-lens.shtml

In the DP1, the lens-sensor distance will probably be even smaller, so I wonder how they will manage the problem. Meanwhile, also some pro DSLR cameras use the micro lens technology.

Edit: I forgot to mention, that in my opinion, software vignetting correction is the wrong way to handle this problem, because this way you are boosting areas which contain much fewer information than the correct exposured areas due to the linear design of sensor units. An interesting article is this one: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

 

[lambsporriegetta]

that makes sense. I knew about sensors with micro lenses to assist with this issue, and assumed that this method was widespread.
I agree with you that software editing in camera to deal with vignetting is pretty daft for users of raw files that want to manipulate the information further.