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A shower thought on cameras
I was looking through some pictures and realized that, starting from pictures taken a few years ago, you won't be able to tell how old a picture is based only on picture quality, even though that's been the case pretty much since the invention of photography.
Yup. In no time at all we'll be sorting our pictures based solely on how bad the hairstyles appearing in them are, just as God and Mr. Eastman intended.
This ties into my own shower thought which is that hair is now the only indicator of era as well. Kids and adults are dressing in all sorts of styles from different generations but if you see a mullet it narrows things down instantly
What do you mean? The only person I know with a mullet is 4. He is rad though
What era do you associate with the mullet? You're obviously not from Australia or New Zealand!
80s-early 90's when lots of actors (good or bad) had them.
Or Canada :P
I mean the mullet where I live has made a full comeback.
Oh there are plenty of people out there today rockin the Kentucky waterfall hairstyle..
mullets are making a comeback, especially in sports
I would so far more than a few years ago. If you look at https://www.dxomark.com/, the image quality of full frame digital sensors plateaued more than a decade ago.
That’s not to say that modern sensors haven’t gotten better - they’ve improved at other things, like scan rate, and gotten higher resolution at the same time.
But that’s more about possibility than capability. With a modern stacked sensor, a sports photographer may be able to consistently take a shot that he’d have a 1 in 2000 chance otherwise. But you, the viewer, can’t tell if he took that shot because his camera can take 120 full quality shots a second or they just got lucky.
Many years ago, when the Lytro was released, I had an inkling that light field cameras could be the next thing in casual photography, particularly if they could get it down to a small enough form factor to use with phones.
Turns out that not only did phone cameras not go down that path, but they have remained pretty niche in general.
I have never heard of light-field cameras before, but after reading about them, what a rad piece of tech. Assuming they don't have any additional limitations compared to regular cameras (I didn't read a ton about them), I feel like they should absolutely be used for photographing any sort of event. Set the focus where you need to publish the nice picture in the article or whatever, but release the focusable light-field image as an historical document*.
*In an open-source format, of course.
I’m still disappointed that their utterly absurd 755 megapixel, 300 fps, three meter long cinema camera never saw real use before they went bankrupt.
I came across it in a retrospective on YouTube recently and had a lot of the same thoughts as you about how amazing it would be to capture all of that extra information for posterity!
But yeah, like @PetitPrince said, the main drawback is the hardware needed to capture all of that data. When you’re ultimately only presenting a tiny slice of the full file at any given time, it’s either going to be very low resolution (as their consumer cameras were), or require that absolute behemoth of a camera to capture orders of magnitude more information so it eventually flattens out to a resolution that matches the industry standard.
The VR suggestion gives me a little bit of hope, though… On screen, you’re by definition only ever seeing a 2D slice of the total data - the extra capabilities are only really seen by the editor - whereas nowadays we’ve got more situations where the end user might be able to benefit from those capabilities too. Throw an array of tiny, high density 2025-era phone camera sensors and some modern image processing into a full frame body and maybe there’s potential here…
Pro: if you scale this principle up you can have volumetric photo and videos. See "Welcome to Light Fields" and this research paper ("Immersive Light Field Video with a Layered Mesh Representation"). If you have a VR headset and a moderately powerful PC, this is the closest you can have to real VR photo and VR video. Your head is actually able to move in a small bubble and you can see details that are behind objects (from what I read, it's so much more than the "spatial photo" of the Apple Visionl which is just 3D-like-in-a-3d-theater but within a headset). It's insanely cool.
Cons: for the Lytro, IIRC one of it's main problem is the terrible resolution of the output. From what I've understood you're putting an array of microlens in front of your sensor to capture a lightfield, but then you need to slash your resolution by this a significant number because a given image is not made out of the whole sensor but only a fraction of it.
Other cons: for the two other demo, you need a half-sphere filled with camera that's as big as the free-movement bubble you're targetting. This automatically exclude casual shooters.
I've had crappy phones for most of my life. My new current phone is pretty good for my standards. So I think I will be able to sort my pictures by quality.
Smart phones have gotten so expensive that I’m pretty sure my current budget model was a downgrade in camera compared to the phone it replaced :(
Film cameras have been able to take extremely high-quality photographs for a very long time now. You might be familiar with low quality prints from a drugstore chain in the 90s, but images from a 35 mm film camera can look fantastic when printed or enlarged properly. Then consider the fact that a 35mm film frame is much much much smaller than a large format photograph, say on something like an 8x10 (inch) sheet film. It’s not clear to me that even the best digital stills cameras today can compete with the level of detail in a film negative of that size.
I understand that what you are saying is generally true, but it’s important not to forget that your impression of old photographs and their quality is skewed because old photographs are old.
We can also look to the point when digital cameras first became generally available - they looked absolutely awful compared to film.
To complement : we are able to have remaster of old movies because they were shot on film. No AI upscaling or whatever, we just need a better scanner. (of course that's a simplification, there's also some restoration and color correction involved).
I'd agree with you until I started printing them out around 13x19 (A3+). Then I could see older D90/D5500/EM1 mki pictures weren't as pretty as my EM1x or A7r4 ones. Then there's flexibility in cropping and better focusing systems. That said it's a remarkable value to grab older full frame slrs and try them out.
Phones are getting that way too. My iPhone 13 or Pixel 8 are probably reaching a plateau soon for 5x7.