Moore's law for cameras

[Wayne Fox]

Lens design as everyone has noted is limiting and to me the major problem we have is not being able to preserve the kind of quality when stopping down past f8.

Perhaps current lens designs anyway.  There are other technologies being researched, including the ability to image the light without optics.  currently not practical, but who knows what the future holds.

[cmi]

If your want to really get technical, you can read the technical report:  http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcame...mera-150dpi.pdf

I didnt understand it fully too, also we are getting more OT, but they essentially place a microlens array at a special distance determined by the maximum aperture in front of the sensor. From a distance the resulting image appears the same as a normal image, but if you zoom in you see tiny image circles on a black background next to each other, like an insects eye. This image now holds information about the direction of the light rays, thereby permitting all sorts of calculations, e.g. refocusing or parallax. As far as they write, this is by now the most flexible technology of this kind.

[Nemo]

The only practical use of a 100MP Bayer (or similar) mass produced camera I can think of is this: you can get 25MP RAW files with full color information for each final "pixel". For particular applications you could enable the 100MP bayer resolution... Or you may get some intermediate resolutions by interpolation. The question is if a Foveon type sensor of 25MP would be a better solution (from a market point of view, including costs and marketing, related to output and workflow). When the MP growth will stop and new designs (more efficient) start to flourish? It will happen? I don't know. Maybe the mosaic-based designs (Bayer or slighly different) is the simplest and more efficient design for the current state of the technology, and the foreseable inmediate future.

[Nemo]

Lens design as everyone has noted is limiting and to me the major problem we have is not being able to preserve the kind of quality when stopping down past f8.

In fact, most produced lenses are zooms, wide-angles and cheap kit lenses for inexpensive cameras. It is very difficult to minimize aberrations under those constraints (size, price...). You can get a diffraction-limited lens at f/4 on axis, but take a look at the price of a Leica lens or a fine telephoto lens from Canon.

You have a good example in the new Zuiko lenses for the micro 4/3 Olympus camera. The 25mm f/2.8 is reported to be not as good as it was expected. It isn't a superfast lens, the format is small... so, what is the problem? I think the cost/price may have been a serious constraint in the design of the lens, besides the size and maybe the contrast based AF of the camera (constraints on the total weight of the lens elements?). You can design and manufacture a much better lens than the Zuiko, but it is not easy if you work under cost limits, size limits, etc. Then, mass-produced lenses and cameras have a different set of constraints than cameras for special applications of even cameras for professional applications. Diffraction problems can be a limiting factor for most of the cameras produced.

[barryfitzgerald]

And the debate rages on! I just read the article by Nathan Myhrvold
Some folks seem to forget that “Moore" was an Intel guy, and digital photography was not what he based the papers on,  computer processors yes..camera sensors no.

At this stage I think the "yes it does matter" debate was far more interesting, because at least it was related to photography and real images!
Also again, sad to see image quality yet again purely based on resolution, nothing ever about tonality or colour etc etc.

Sad to see..keep playing away folks, the nerds are having fun!