John Young asked:
Bob pushed the shutter release button and…NOTHING HAPPENED. The football passed into his son’s hands and the actual photo he took was one of a cheerleader’s pom-pom. Bob missed the touchdown too. He resisted an insane urge to slam the camera to the ground and jump on it.
This was his first digital camera, and Bob had just experienced an unpleasant surprise. He had used film cameras all his life, but when his Yashica went into the shop a friend loaned him a digital camera. He naively decided to take some action shots and discovered the most maddening “feature” of digital cameras – the shutter delay.
MADDENING AND FRUSTRATING
Articles on this subject have attributed shutter delay to:
1. The camera’s focus system
2. The time it takes the camera to digitally process the image
3. Reaction time of the photographer
Numbers one and three are lag times that most people using digital cameras are accustomed to. Most have used a film camera and know it needs a few milliseconds to focus.
The no-brainer solution is to reduce the aperture of the lens to increase depth of field, or aim the camera at the object you wish to be in focus and depress the shutter button half way in order to “tell” the camera what to focus on, then move the camera to center the image and depress it the rest of the way.
As far as human reaction time, well, it hasn’t really changed much for users of film cameras, and people experienced in taking action shots usually get what they want.
So let’s look at number 2, the time it takes to process the picture.
TIME TO DO THE PROCESSING
Processing the picture (so the camera can be ready for the next one) comes in several steps to move it from the image sensor to flash card storage:
1. Color corrections. The camera has to examine each and every Charge Couple Device (CCD) element on the photo sensor. It adds green, blue, and red to achieve the right color balance. For a 3 mega pixel camera, the processor has to make 9 million calculations.
2. Sharpening. This boosts the contrast by detecting and sharpening edges.
3. Compression. This process converts the 12 to 14 bits of each CCD sensor to 16 bits by “padding” the information and compressing it to 8 bits. This compresses the file size to 9 megabytes.
These steps require a tremendous amount of computational time. No wonder Bob missed his shot!
CATCHING THE ACTION
There are two ways of capturing action:
1. The “consecutive mode”. If the camera has this mode, you can take a series of rapid shots moving through the event. This requires a camera with a large ‘buffer” to hold photos for processing.
2. Anticipating shots by depressing and holding down the shutter release prior to the event. This requires an ability to predict the future, something most of us don’t possess.
THE FUTURE OF FASTER SHOOTING
Obviously this would all be simplified if micro processing were faster. Even with large buffers, the speed in which data is transmitted to the processor is prohibited by the rate at which data is conveyed from the CCD. Micro processing speed is the next bottleneck.
Faster clock rates and data transfer speeds would reduce or even eliminate “shutter lag” time. There are several technologies in the wings that offer hope:
1. Nanotube and nanowire technologies. These are both the offspring of “nanotechnology”, the ability to make tiny machines at the “nano” level, a billionth of a meter in size rather than a millionth of a meter (micrometer) and offer hope for a 500 GHz clock rate or more.
2. DNA Yes, you heard me right. Computing based on DNA strands in which information is stored and processed.
3. Other materials
• Gallium Arsenide with much a faster speed has been used for years for military purposes.
• Silicon-Germanium chips increase the transfer of light signals to silicon. These traditionally have worked best at ultra cold temperatures, but many computer simulations have shown that they may be made to approach 1000 GHz (1 THz) at room temperature.
• Indium-antimonide. Much faster than silicon
• Optical transistors. A glass material known as chalcogenide becomes a switch as its refracting properties are changed. No need to translate those photons into anything else.
• Coated Viruses. The latest research involves coating viruses with a conducting material. Much higher speeds at the molecular level can be obtained. This will give a new meaning to the term “computer virus”.
4. Parallel Processing. As we’ve noticed lately with the war between Intel and AMD over the number of parallel processors crammed into a CPU, digital camera processing would benefit from parallel processors handling the focussing, sharpening and squeezing.
5. Improvement in instructional efficiency by reducing the lines of code would make the whole process more efficient.
HOLD ON AND WAIT FOR THE FUTURE
The REAL solution to this maddening shutter delay appears to be in the material the processor is constructed of, as well as advancements in the software.
But we’ve got awhile to wait for it. Although a few alternate materials have been around for awhile, everything else is still in the research and development phase. Even when it finally trickles out of the labs, it will probably make your future digital camera cost around $10000 – $15000.
Quite a price tag for the ability to take pictures as fast as a film camera! Still…
Except for the lag, the digital camera has it all over film cameras, once the photo is captured by the memory card. The new technology will be worth the wait.
Digital camera owners are known for their ability to wait…as they desperately punch the shutter release trying to grab the fleeting smile of their new baby, or the football that lands in his hands eighteen years later, when he scores the winning touchdown.
Bob pushed the shutter release button and…NOTHING HAPPENED. The football passed into his son’s hands and the actual photo he took was one of a cheerleader’s pom-pom. Bob missed the touchdown too. He resisted an insane urge to slam the camera to the ground and jump on it.
This was his first digital camera, and Bob had just experienced an unpleasant surprise. He had used film cameras all his life, but when his Yashica went into the shop a friend loaned him a digital camera. He naively decided to take some action shots and discovered the most maddening “feature” of digital cameras – the shutter delay.
MADDENING AND FRUSTRATING
Articles on this subject have attributed shutter delay to:
1. The camera’s focus system
2. The time it takes the camera to digitally process the image
3. Reaction time of the photographer
Numbers one and three are lag times that most people using digital cameras are accustomed to. Most have used a film camera and know it needs a few milliseconds to focus.
The no-brainer solution is to reduce the aperture of the lens to increase depth of field, or aim the camera at the object you wish to be in focus and depress the shutter button half way in order to “tell” the camera what to focus on, then move the camera to center the image and depress it the rest of the way.
As far as human reaction time, well, it hasn’t really changed much for users of film cameras, and people experienced in taking action shots usually get what they want.
So let’s look at number 2, the time it takes to process the picture.
TIME TO DO THE PROCESSING
Processing the picture (so the camera can be ready for the next one) comes in several steps to move it from the image sensor to flash card storage:
1. Color corrections. The camera has to examine each and every Charge Couple Device (CCD) element on the photo sensor. It adds green, blue, and red to achieve the right color balance. For a 3 mega pixel camera, the processor has to make 9 million calculations.
2. Sharpening. This boosts the contrast by detecting and sharpening edges.
3. Compression. This process converts the 12 to 14 bits of each CCD sensor to 16 bits by “padding” the information and compressing it to 8 bits. This compresses the file size to 9 megabytes.
These steps require a tremendous amount of computational time. No wonder Bob missed his shot!
CATCHING THE ACTION
There are two ways of capturing action:
1. The “consecutive mode”. If the camera has this mode, you can take a series of rapid shots moving through the event. This requires a camera with a large ‘buffer” to hold photos for processing.
2. Anticipating shots by depressing and holding down the shutter release prior to the event. This requires an ability to predict the future, something most of us don’t possess.
THE FUTURE OF FASTER SHOOTING
Obviously this would all be simplified if micro processing were faster. Even with large buffers, the speed in which data is transmitted to the processor is prohibited by the rate at which data is conveyed from the CCD. Micro processing speed is the next bottleneck.
Faster clock rates and data transfer speeds would reduce or even eliminate “shutter lag” time. There are several technologies in the wings that offer hope:
1. Nanotube and nanowire technologies. These are both the offspring of “nanotechnology”, the ability to make tiny machines at the “nano” level, a billionth of a meter in size rather than a millionth of a meter (micrometer) and offer hope for a 500 GHz clock rate or more.
2. DNA Yes, you heard me right. Computing based on DNA strands in which information is stored and processed.
3. Other materials
• Gallium Arsenide with much a faster speed has been used for years for military purposes.
• Silicon-Germanium chips increase the transfer of light signals to silicon. These traditionally have worked best at ultra cold temperatures, but many computer simulations have shown that they may be made to approach 1000 GHz (1 THz) at room temperature.
• Indium-antimonide. Much faster than silicon
• Optical transistors. A glass material known as chalcogenide becomes a switch as its refracting properties are changed. No need to translate those photons into anything else.
• Coated Viruses. The latest research involves coating viruses with a conducting material. Much higher speeds at the molecular level can be obtained. This will give a new meaning to the term “computer virus”.
4. Parallel Processing. As we’ve noticed lately with the war between Intel and AMD over the number of parallel processors crammed into a CPU, digital camera processing would benefit from parallel processors handling the focussing, sharpening and squeezing.
5. Improvement in instructional efficiency by reducing the lines of code would make the whole process more efficient.
HOLD ON AND WAIT FOR THE FUTURE
The REAL solution to this maddening shutter delay appears to be in the material the processor is constructed of, as well as advancements in the software.
But we’ve got awhile to wait for it. Although a few alternate materials have been around for awhile, everything else is still in the research and development phase. Even when it finally trickles out of the labs, it will probably make your future digital camera cost around $10000 – $15000.
Quite a price tag for the ability to take pictures as fast as a film camera! Still…
Except for the lag, the digital camera has it all over film cameras, once the photo is captured by the memory card. The new technology will be worth the wait.
Digital camera owners are known for their ability to wait…as they desperately punch the shutter release trying to grab the fleeting smile of their new baby, or the football that lands in his hands eighteen years later, when he scores the winning touchdown.
Filed under Advertising
kj ross asked:
Sony Digital Video Cameras have been bought over the Internet 235 instances over the last 30 days. Most of these 235 items sold were found by using the auction sites that you can find online. We’ll explore all the different aspects of deciding to buy Sony Digital Video Cameras using your home computer. It will give you a very accurate pricing guide to use as you begin making your decision about all your choices available for Sony Digital Video Cameras.
The choices that can be found for consumers looking to purchase Sony Digital Video Cameras are more numerous than anything anyone could have envisioned a few years ago. Ecommerce merchant sites and popular auction sites are what has caused this to happen. If you were to examine the last 30 days, Sony Digital Video Camera offered through online auctions accounted for $72,255.93. The number of times they were listed was 406 times according to the data available. Examining the information about the 406 different times they were listed, 225 of them ended with a completed purchase. So when you do the math, that means that the success rate was 55.42%, and there was an average of 11 sellers offering Sony Digital Video Cameras online every day of the year.
After taking a good look at what is happening in the online marketplace, let’s take a good look at what was actually spent for these purchases. On average, the amount that people had to pay to buy Sony Digital Video Cameras was $307.47. The highest winning bid was $4,045.00. The single lowest purchase price was $0.99. But the average person shopping in online auctions successfully bid at around $328.99. The important thing that this suggests is if you can find something right at or anywhere below $328.99, then you know you will have purchased at a good price.
When you’re beginning to shop for Sony Digital Video Cameras, the most promising place to start looking is definitely in the area where the featured items are. Depending on the particular online auction, these can be things that are put up by category, or you might find them prominently listed anywhere you look. Featured items sell faster than the regular listings do, which is probably the reason why they also have a higher percentage of being successful. In the period during the past 30 days, 3 Sony Digital Video Cameras were listed specifically in a category of other similar items. Among all 3 listings, 3 ended successfully. So the success of items sold in the featured listings category is 100.00%.
Now what we’ll concentrate on is the type of listing that the seller chooses. When putting up their Sony Digital Video Camera on one of the many auction websites, people can sell a particular item for as short a time frame as one day, all the way up to ten days. The listing type that you will want to look for is Store listings because it will have the best average price of $134.99. If Store listing types are not offered, then the next best type to look for is Bid-Auctions listings. Bid-Auctions listings have an average closing price of $281.40.
Doing your homework and being prepared is something that will pay off in how much money you spend when you shop online. It is up to you to make sure that you have the best pricing information you can find for Sony Digital Video Cameras when you go online to start your shopping. When you do begin to compare prices, be sure to use what you have learned in this article so you know if the price you find is indeed the true average price, and use that as a guideline when placing any bids on Sony Digital Video Cameras. When at an online auction site, if it has featured categories, look at the information in them carefully because they often have the best prices. Another tip is to try to time your shopping on the days with the lowest ending prices, and you will increase your chances that you will probably be happy with your winning bid on Sony Digital Video Cameras.
Sony Digital Video Cameras have been bought over the Internet 235 instances over the last 30 days. Most of these 235 items sold were found by using the auction sites that you can find online. We’ll explore all the different aspects of deciding to buy Sony Digital Video Cameras using your home computer. It will give you a very accurate pricing guide to use as you begin making your decision about all your choices available for Sony Digital Video Cameras.
The choices that can be found for consumers looking to purchase Sony Digital Video Cameras are more numerous than anything anyone could have envisioned a few years ago. Ecommerce merchant sites and popular auction sites are what has caused this to happen. If you were to examine the last 30 days, Sony Digital Video Camera offered through online auctions accounted for $72,255.93. The number of times they were listed was 406 times according to the data available. Examining the information about the 406 different times they were listed, 225 of them ended with a completed purchase. So when you do the math, that means that the success rate was 55.42%, and there was an average of 11 sellers offering Sony Digital Video Cameras online every day of the year.
After taking a good look at what is happening in the online marketplace, let’s take a good look at what was actually spent for these purchases. On average, the amount that people had to pay to buy Sony Digital Video Cameras was $307.47. The highest winning bid was $4,045.00. The single lowest purchase price was $0.99. But the average person shopping in online auctions successfully bid at around $328.99. The important thing that this suggests is if you can find something right at or anywhere below $328.99, then you know you will have purchased at a good price.
When you’re beginning to shop for Sony Digital Video Cameras, the most promising place to start looking is definitely in the area where the featured items are. Depending on the particular online auction, these can be things that are put up by category, or you might find them prominently listed anywhere you look. Featured items sell faster than the regular listings do, which is probably the reason why they also have a higher percentage of being successful. In the period during the past 30 days, 3 Sony Digital Video Cameras were listed specifically in a category of other similar items. Among all 3 listings, 3 ended successfully. So the success of items sold in the featured listings category is 100.00%.
Now what we’ll concentrate on is the type of listing that the seller chooses. When putting up their Sony Digital Video Camera on one of the many auction websites, people can sell a particular item for as short a time frame as one day, all the way up to ten days. The listing type that you will want to look for is Store listings because it will have the best average price of $134.99. If Store listing types are not offered, then the next best type to look for is Bid-Auctions listings. Bid-Auctions listings have an average closing price of $281.40.
Doing your homework and being prepared is something that will pay off in how much money you spend when you shop online. It is up to you to make sure that you have the best pricing information you can find for Sony Digital Video Cameras when you go online to start your shopping. When you do begin to compare prices, be sure to use what you have learned in this article so you know if the price you find is indeed the true average price, and use that as a guideline when placing any bids on Sony Digital Video Cameras. When at an online auction site, if it has featured categories, look at the information in them carefully because they often have the best prices. Another tip is to try to time your shopping on the days with the lowest ending prices, and you will increase your chances that you will probably be happy with your winning bid on Sony Digital Video Cameras.
Filed under Internet