With the advent of the consumer digital camera, along came a tidal wave of interest in personal photography. People immediately saw the benefits and began to take advantage. In 2004, 22 million digital cameras were sold in North America. 37 million were sold in 2007 and 40 million were sold in 2008. In 2005, there was a noticeable difference in the make-up of the buyer. Prior to that year, the vast majority of buyers were first timers. However in 2005, we began to see that many repeat buyers entered the market.
The proliferation of the digital camera coincided with the proliferation of the cell phone. The two technologies have been combined giving consumers a quick easy way to share photos instantly across the globe. Twenty years ago, if one had entered a college classroom and asked how many students were carrying a camera with them, you might have found one or two. But today, almost every student has a camera on their cell phone and many others will have a digital camera in their purse or backpack.
The first digital cameras produced such low resolution or were so heavy and bulky that they really weren’t usable by the average consumer. It wasn’t until 1999 that the first two megapixel camera was manufactured that was light-weight enough and produced the resolution necessary to interest consumers. Since then, consumers have been the beneficiaries of megapixel envy amongst manufacturers. We quickly realized that the more megapixels in a camera, the better the picture. Manufacturers have pushed their engineers fast and furious to produce higher and higher resolution cameras. Today, one can find several cameras at local stores that flaunt 12-14 megapixel resolution and sell for under $200.
The megapixel war is now coming to an end. This is because the average person cannot tell the difference between an 8 megapixel photo printed at 8x10 inches versus a14 megapixel photo printed the same size. Where one would begin seeing the difference between these resolutions would be when they print enlargements of the photos. An 8 megapixel photo can produce a nice quality photo at 16x20 inches but starts to noticeably diminish in quality with larger prints. A 10 megapixel photo can produce nice quality in a 17x22 inch print. I typically print 8x10 inch or smaller prints so I don’t notice the difference between the two. I think that most people are similar to me in this respect.
Since the megapixel war is winding down, what are manufacturers doing to attract buyers? Features, features, and more features. Digital imagery is ideal for combining with computing technology. That is exactly what is being done. After the camera’s sensor measures the scene it sees, software inside the camera process it in many ways. The very basic adjustments are to remove imperfections (noise) created by the electronics, and color and exposure adjustments based on the settings the user selected on the camera. Beyond that, manufacturers are getting creative and trying to make it easier and easier for the average person to take flawless photos.
Image stabilization allows the camera to adjust for shaky hands. Sometimes when taking long exposures or with high zoom, slight movement of the camera causes blurring. Cameras can reduce these affects through hardware or software.
Face recognition is a feature that allows the camera to automatically focus on and adjust exposure settings for any human faces that it detects. Some cameras allow the photographer to select a face from a group as the primary subject. The camera follows that individual and keeps him/her in focus and at proper exposure.
Red-eye prevention is another popular feature. Often when using flash, the eyes of people in the photograph turn bright red as the flash lights up their retinas. Many of today’s cameras have a setting that will cause the flash to give very brief short burst or two of light just before the main flash and the picture is taken. This causes the pupils of the subject to close, this minimizing the amount of red that can reflect from their retinas.
Smile detection allows the user to let the camera take the picture automatically as soon as it detects a smile. Some cameras even allow you to adjust its sensitivity so that you don’t get belly laughs or small smirks.
The blink detection feature tells the camera to take two pictures in rapid succession. The software in the camera then examines the pictures and picks the one where the eyes are most open. This all happens so fast that the subjects don’t have time to do anything but open their eyes between pictures.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
History & Technology
Digital photography or digital imaging touches nearly every industry in some way. Without it our lives would surely be very different. In my this and future blog postings, I will be discussing the history of photography and the advent of digital photography. Particularly, how it has affected business and what the future holds.
Since the first photograph was taken in the early 1800’s in France, thousands upon thousands of people have taken photographs of some sort. According to ZDNet, fifty billion digital photos were taken in 2007. That’s a lot of photos.
The first photograph, taken in 1826 in France by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, had an eight hour exposure. By today’s standards, that’s unheard of. It was a very grainy picture of the landscape from a window in his home using a technique he called “heliography”. But it wasn’t until 1939 that the term “photography” was coined by Sir John Frederick William Herschel. It was in that same year that the that Robert Cornelius took the very first human portrait.
The first commercially viable process developed by French chemist Louis Daguerre was called “daguerreotype”. This was an expensive process and required special equipment but was used widely by professionals in France and the US.
In 1888, George Eastman invented Celluloid Film which is still in use today, although it is quickly being replaced with the advent of digital photography.
NASA began using digital signals in the 1960’s to get pictures of the moon sent back to earth from space probes. This technology was instrumental in the development of today’s digital camera technology. George Smith and Willard Boyle are credited with developing the charge-coupled device (CCD) that has been used in most of today’s digital cameras.
Photos from the early CCD were not very usable as the resolution was very low. Finally in 1986, Kodak developed the first megapixel CCD. Since then, the megapixel hype has dominated the digital market. Manufactures have worked feverishly to increase the resolution of their devices. Today, the average consumer can purchase 12 megapixel point-and-shoot digital cameras for under $200. Photos at this resolution can be printed with very high quality at 20x30 inches or more. When was the last time the average camera user printed anything that large?
The charge-coupled device that is the heart of most of today’s digital cameras works because it has millions of small light receptors called “photosites”. Each of these photosites represents one of the primary colors for one pixel. When the photographer presses the camera’s button, light is allowed to enter the lens and is focused on the CCD sensor. The amount of light that hits each of the photosites is registered as a number that represents the intensity of the light at that point. This array of numbers is then stored in memory. When one views one of these photos on a computer, the numbers are converted back into colored dots (pixels) and displayed on a screen.
Most cameras have software built in that processes the images before they are actually stored in memory. The software in most cameras convert the image from its raw format right from the sensor to the common jpg format for storage. It is often during this conversion process that the built-in software makes adjustments to the image based on camera settings such as exposure and type of lighting. Most manufacturers add other tasks to this conversion process to clean up the image from sensor noise and other inherent image problems caused by the imperfect technology. Thanks to the programming efforts by the manufacturer, we see nice clean and sometimes corrected images.
Some of the higher end digital cameras will allow the photographer to save the original “raw” image just as it comes from the sensor. This image format is ingeniously called “RAW” format. Before it can be viewed by traditional software, it must be converted to one of the more common image formats such as jpg, bmp, or gif. The advantage with the raw format is that photographers have more power to manipulate the image they way they want instead of having to live with what the manufacturer decided was best. From this format, photographers can manipulate the photos in ways that cannot be done once the image is in one of the traditional formats.
Since the first photograph was taken in the early 1800’s in France, thousands upon thousands of people have taken photographs of some sort. According to ZDNet, fifty billion digital photos were taken in 2007. That’s a lot of photos.
The first photograph, taken in 1826 in France by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, had an eight hour exposure. By today’s standards, that’s unheard of. It was a very grainy picture of the landscape from a window in his home using a technique he called “heliography”. But it wasn’t until 1939 that the term “photography” was coined by Sir John Frederick William Herschel. It was in that same year that the that Robert Cornelius took the very first human portrait.
The first commercially viable process developed by French chemist Louis Daguerre was called “daguerreotype”. This was an expensive process and required special equipment but was used widely by professionals in France and the US.
In 1888, George Eastman invented Celluloid Film which is still in use today, although it is quickly being replaced with the advent of digital photography.
NASA began using digital signals in the 1960’s to get pictures of the moon sent back to earth from space probes. This technology was instrumental in the development of today’s digital camera technology. George Smith and Willard Boyle are credited with developing the charge-coupled device (CCD) that has been used in most of today’s digital cameras.
Photos from the early CCD were not very usable as the resolution was very low. Finally in 1986, Kodak developed the first megapixel CCD. Since then, the megapixel hype has dominated the digital market. Manufactures have worked feverishly to increase the resolution of their devices. Today, the average consumer can purchase 12 megapixel point-and-shoot digital cameras for under $200. Photos at this resolution can be printed with very high quality at 20x30 inches or more. When was the last time the average camera user printed anything that large?
The charge-coupled device that is the heart of most of today’s digital cameras works because it has millions of small light receptors called “photosites”. Each of these photosites represents one of the primary colors for one pixel. When the photographer presses the camera’s button, light is allowed to enter the lens and is focused on the CCD sensor. The amount of light that hits each of the photosites is registered as a number that represents the intensity of the light at that point. This array of numbers is then stored in memory. When one views one of these photos on a computer, the numbers are converted back into colored dots (pixels) and displayed on a screen.
Most cameras have software built in that processes the images before they are actually stored in memory. The software in most cameras convert the image from its raw format right from the sensor to the common jpg format for storage. It is often during this conversion process that the built-in software makes adjustments to the image based on camera settings such as exposure and type of lighting. Most manufacturers add other tasks to this conversion process to clean up the image from sensor noise and other inherent image problems caused by the imperfect technology. Thanks to the programming efforts by the manufacturer, we see nice clean and sometimes corrected images.
Some of the higher end digital cameras will allow the photographer to save the original “raw” image just as it comes from the sensor. This image format is ingeniously called “RAW” format. Before it can be viewed by traditional software, it must be converted to one of the more common image formats such as jpg, bmp, or gif. The advantage with the raw format is that photographers have more power to manipulate the image they way they want instead of having to live with what the manufacturer decided was best. From this format, photographers can manipulate the photos in ways that cannot be done once the image is in one of the traditional formats.
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