ferider
Veteran
Maybe an exaggeration of my feelings until two weeks ago, uhoh7. Now things are different, 2015 will be my first "digital year" (See also http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146411).Digital vs. film aside, I have also been trying to provide an engineering perspective to your OP, since semiconductor manufacturing, chip design and signal processing are how I earn my living.
Roland.
Pioneer
Veteran
Digital vs. film aside, I have also been trying to provide an engineering perspective to your OP, since semiconductor manufacturing, chip design and signal processing are how I earn my living.
Roland.
And that has certainly been a fun thread to follow Roland.
John Brawley
Newbie
There's a lot that contributes
There's a lot that contributes
I'm a motion picture cinematographer and I've had a little bit of behind the scenes development with a couple of cameras that have been developed and brought to market for motion imaging.
Making sensors for cameras is really hard and there's only a handful of foundries that do it.
The very vast majority of sensors made are for what they call industrial use, usually for things like speed cameras or in machine vision where they use them for quality control processes in manufacturing. They have much lower thresholds for imaging "defects" that we would find unacceptable.
Very discerning users, like my esteemed colleges here and in motion imaging are actually a really really small and tiny market...
We rarely talk about the SPECTRAL response of a sensor. The language of RAW as we understand it as photographers has lead to a believe that a sensor can capture and represent the same colour GAMUT and reproduce all colours equally but this is very very far from true.
There is a lot to be credited to Kodak's original colour science on that particular sensor / sensor family. It's also at the heart of a motion camera that was created on Kickstarter with that sensor being one of the primary drivers of developing the camera.
So theres the spectral response of the sensor, then there's the colour science behind creating the matrix that "calibrates" the sensor's response....This calibration also isn't an exact science. It requires choices to be made that are subjective.
I hate to start a comparison to cars because I actually don't know much about them but the sensor is kind of like the engine. Just like you have race cars based on the same engine, a lot can be done to tweak the performance to suit certain parameters...
Trying to define a car only by it's engine is a bit simplistic to the end result. It's a whole package of a lot of choices of which the engine is the most important foundation....
As someone who shoots with a lot of different cameras, I've only started shooting Leica in the last few years. I started with an M8 and I bought an M-E a couple of months ago.
I bought the M-E because I like the way that sensor does skin tone and that's what's important to me. There are plenty of downsides too mind and I struggle with them all the time the lack of DR, the lack of better ISO performance, but I find the Leica CCD sensor "package" to capture colour and especially skin tones in a wonderful way that always leaves me disappointed when I return to other CMOS based imagers.
I do know that CCD sensor tech is considered OLD and not where all the big R&D money is being spent on new sensor technology. It's almost across the board being done in CMOS....
JB
John Brawley
Cinematographer
Sydney Australia
www.johnbrawley.com
blog at
https://johnbrawley.wordpress.com
PS....
Here's a link to a flicker page. There's a mix of a few cameras. But the Leica skin tones always stand out for me....
Any title with a prefix of L is Leica. Any with the R prefix is a frame grab from an Arri Alexa. Any with A is frame grab from a RED EPIC. And without a letter code is an Olympus (Probably an EM5)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnbrawley/sets/72157648958079115/
There's a lot that contributes
I'm a motion picture cinematographer and I've had a little bit of behind the scenes development with a couple of cameras that have been developed and brought to market for motion imaging.
Making sensors for cameras is really hard and there's only a handful of foundries that do it.
The very vast majority of sensors made are for what they call industrial use, usually for things like speed cameras or in machine vision where they use them for quality control processes in manufacturing. They have much lower thresholds for imaging "defects" that we would find unacceptable.
Very discerning users, like my esteemed colleges here and in motion imaging are actually a really really small and tiny market...
We rarely talk about the SPECTRAL response of a sensor. The language of RAW as we understand it as photographers has lead to a believe that a sensor can capture and represent the same colour GAMUT and reproduce all colours equally but this is very very far from true.
There is a lot to be credited to Kodak's original colour science on that particular sensor / sensor family. It's also at the heart of a motion camera that was created on Kickstarter with that sensor being one of the primary drivers of developing the camera.
So theres the spectral response of the sensor, then there's the colour science behind creating the matrix that "calibrates" the sensor's response....This calibration also isn't an exact science. It requires choices to be made that are subjective.
I hate to start a comparison to cars because I actually don't know much about them but the sensor is kind of like the engine. Just like you have race cars based on the same engine, a lot can be done to tweak the performance to suit certain parameters...
Trying to define a car only by it's engine is a bit simplistic to the end result. It's a whole package of a lot of choices of which the engine is the most important foundation....
As someone who shoots with a lot of different cameras, I've only started shooting Leica in the last few years. I started with an M8 and I bought an M-E a couple of months ago.
I bought the M-E because I like the way that sensor does skin tone and that's what's important to me. There are plenty of downsides too mind and I struggle with them all the time the lack of DR, the lack of better ISO performance, but I find the Leica CCD sensor "package" to capture colour and especially skin tones in a wonderful way that always leaves me disappointed when I return to other CMOS based imagers.
I do know that CCD sensor tech is considered OLD and not where all the big R&D money is being spent on new sensor technology. It's almost across the board being done in CMOS....
JB
John Brawley
Cinematographer
Sydney Australia
www.johnbrawley.com
blog at
https://johnbrawley.wordpress.com
PS....
Here's a link to a flicker page. There's a mix of a few cameras. But the Leica skin tones always stand out for me....
Any title with a prefix of L is Leica. Any with the R prefix is a frame grab from an Arri Alexa. Any with A is frame grab from a RED EPIC. And without a letter code is an Olympus (Probably an EM5)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnbrawley/sets/72157648958079115/