20 MP Cell Phones by 2012 = 40 MP APS-C and 60 MP FF?

[A1000]

20 MP Cell Phones in 3 years
http://www.intomobile.com/2008/11/07/so ... -2012.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Now the max is 8MP. 35 mm FF is max 24 MP. Would FF MP increase to 60, APS-C to 40?

Current top resolving cell phones are 8 MP, APS-C cameras 15 MP and FF 24 MP. Top cell phones are supposed to increase resolution to 20 MP. If the same ratios are kept to the resolution of DSLR's, that would translate to 37 MP APS-C and 62 MP FF.

12MP cell phone cams are coming out next year:
http://www.intomobile.com/2008/11/13/so ... ng-up.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

CMOS Market Share - Sony has 12%:
http://www.vision-systems.com/display_a ... k?dcmp=rss" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.semiconductor.net/article/CA6551128.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Sony has about 60 percent market share in the CCD imager market
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtm ... =197006176" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Canon invests .5 billon $ in new CMOS manufacturer, made this announcement soon after similar Sony announcement:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Canon-to ... 9970.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Up until now, Canon's compact cameras have included CCD sensors, most of them purchased from Sony, which also supplies Nikon and Pentax. Nikon has been experimenting with other sensor designs, which materialized in the LBCAST (Lateral Buried Charge Accumulator and Sensing Transistor array) Junction Field Effect Transistor (JFET) solution implemented in the professional D2H. However, the second largest manufacturer came back to Sony and continued to implement their CCD and CMOS units.

New CMOS Technology:
http://optics.org/cws/article/industry/36630" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Cell Phome Market Share:
http://stats.getjar.com/statistics/worl ... cturer/All" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Sony is close on its target of achieving 20% market share:
http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Digital_Ph ... s/F5R5K4S2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[alphaomega]

Thanks for the information A1000. Problem is that the only piece of information relevant to Sony DSLR owners/users was at the bottom as:

Sony is close on its target of achieving 20% market share: http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Digital_Ph" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... s/F5R5K4S2

Only problem is that when clicking through on the link you get a magazine page written in June 2006 regarding the launch of the venerable A100.

Sony Clicks With Digital SLR - By Manisha Kanetkar & David Richards | Thursday | 29/06/2006

[PhotoTraveler]

Sony's latest cell phone photosite could scale up to a 440MP FF sensor. Doesn't mean they are going to do it anytime soon.

[A1000]

What we will see is constant gradual increase in No. of MP's. The main reason is that it will make more money for the manufacturers, bacause it will translate to more uprades by the consumers. Another reason is that the technology has long way to go to reach its peak, so even with the increased MP #'s, other areas of performance will be improved.

The biggest new technology competitiors will become Canon, Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung, the CMOS makers that will be able to fuse photography and video functions to make new better photography tools due to this fusion. Taking pictures will never be the same.

We can more or less say good bye to Pentax and Olympus.

Nikon, with its cooperation with Sony, will continue to be one of the top competitors.

These will, IMHO, be the top DSLR brands, in that order:

Canon
Sony
Nikon
Panasonic
Samsung

[bfitzgerald]

Not all of us are dumb enough to buy a camera based on mp alone..

[alphaomega]

I regret that A1000 in his contribution today did not provide us with a proper link to the Web site showing Sony's market share as being close to 20%. That kind of undermines the objectivity of the statement. Clicking on http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Digital_Ph ... s/F5R5K4S2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; still leads me to that A100 review back in 2006 on the Smarthouse Web site.

[A1000]

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... =32&t=1480" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Armen Gharib]

Hi
Could you please inform in what region are varying aperture and shooter speed of the best cell phone cameras??

[Dusty]

What we will see is constant gradual increase in No. of MP's. The main reason is that it will make more money for the manufacturers, bacause it will translate to more uprades by the consumers.

How much will people be willing to upgrade? Do I need a camera with so much resolution that I can take a wide angle shot of beach and determine the weave of the bathing suit of someone at the far end of the beach? Only if I'm a spy!

In the computer field, we saw performance increases because of feature bloat and sloppy coding requiring faster processors and more memory. Now, however, we have quad core processors for desktops that are so overboard for the typical office need that it's a joke! We will need them, however to process those 2GB RAW files we'll soon be seeing.

Don't get me wrong, I could have bought a camera with fewer MP, and would love a A900 if I could afford one, however I will max out some day on the need for higher resolution.

Dusty

[PhotoTraveler]

Well, MP increase has to blow up in their faces first before the trend changes. Just like how computers didn't change until they were melting due to the intel mini-nuclear reactors inside.

MP is ClockSpeed. Consumers "Know" more is better. And for many years, they were right. It's just not an easy thing to equate things to anything else. People need numbers/values/feature count to make their judgement.

Most people do nothing far as looking at images from a camera before buying. They buy based on the highest MP verses a price. Which ever has the best ratio wins. Sony did well with the A350 because it had a very good pix/pri ratio.

Now after getting a camera, some folks will go "darn, these images suck", and promptly go for another camera, but they will get it right this time and buy a different brand and get one with more pixels. Wash rinse repeat.

In reality, more Pixels isn't bad at all. It just carries some side effects. But in reality we are far from it being very bad. We now have 24MP cameras that take clean ISO 800 shots. People need to step back and take that in. You got a camera that makes a joke of film on resolution, and is shooting at an ISO speed where the films that even try to catch up would be shooting at ISO50. My X-700 has never seen a roll of ISO 800 film, it's only seen 400 a couple times. It was almost alway 100 or 200.

If cameras just get to total junk, they will step back. But having pushed the rez so hard would have created noise management tech and other aspects to their peaks that when applied to lower res chips you get great results. And this could very well happen. There is a sister world to still cameras where consumers aren't bothered with resolution.....video. All people care is it's HD. No one thinks in pixels there. If they just came up with names for particular resolutions people might not care so much. Something like that could happen.

But I think more likely is a new architecture for sensors is created and it causes a big step back. Probably some sort of non-silicon sensor. Something produced on coating lines like OLEDs. This makes sensors big and cheap, but puts the resolution back many steps for years. So there is a reset, and if done right people get focused on things are than MP. Just like the big re-think on CPUs happened, and no you see few people paying much attention to mhz. Yeah, mhz is still there, but people shop now for the name of the CPU, number of cores, energy efficiency and such. CPU makers did a good job when they reset to shift the focus. Largely because they had to, they axed their bizziahtz chips and when back to 1mhz. So clock speed was out for years. Camera makers could do this and get people focused on noise, color, DR. Afterall, when a camera with a new architecture hits and it's 5MP and all the rest are 20MP, you aren't going to hype the 5MP. Another aspect is look at OLED tvs. Sony has their 11" one. Go to the website for it and it's hard to see them tell you how big it is. Since it's 11" tv, in an era where 40" has become small. So they shifted to "look at the colors" "look how thin", etc.

If camera/sensor makes come up with a whole new method for making sensors, that resets what they can do for resolution, but offers lots of gains where they shift there, the exact same thing will happen, and the MP race ends.

[A1000]

In reality, more Pixels isn't bad at all. It just carries some side effects. But in reality we are far from it being very bad. We now have 24MP cameras that take clean ISO 800 shots. People need to step back and take that in. You got a camera that makes a joke of film on resolution, and is shooting at an ISO speed where the films that even try to catch up would be shooting at ISO50. My X-700 has never seen a roll of ISO 800 film, it's only seen 400 a couple times. It was almost alway 100 or 200.

add to it IS and your 10x higher ASA sensitivity just becomes 40x higher

24 MP is resolution of new ultra definition TV system being developed in Japan, even BBC is helping. Demonstraions have been done for years now in Japan

New pro HD video cameras will be 8 MP, current ones are 2 MP

8MP= 4K is one of the new digital projection film standards; Sony is already installing their 4K projectors in some theaters. Past projection was 2 MP at most.

[PhotoTraveler]

I think you are confusing with 24P framerate.

24MP tv, I'm not believing that without a lot of supporting info.

Yes, cinema camera record at 4k and such. But there is no tv's or transmission doing that. 1080P tvs aren't even the base yet. And no one broadcast in 1080p, some don't even broadcast in 1080i.

I haven't seen anything yet on them getting past 1080p. Yes, they need to as the quality of the image tanks on a tv above 40 inches. But until 1080p becomes as universal as 480i we are a long road out.

Movies will get recorded at these high resolutions and then compressed. But average joes won't be carrying. People in general don't know much on video or tv resolutions. People think their HD tv is higher rez than their camera

[A1000]

http://www.nhk.or.jp/digital/en/technical/02_super.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


http://campustechnology.com/Articles/20 ... ineup.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


http://www.broadcastpapers.com/whitepap ... Speech.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

4K camera development

Sony also confirmed it is working on developing a 4K camera system although this will not be available until 2009 at the earliest. “We are continuing to develop a complete 4K digital system based around our 4K digital projector,” said Willox. “4K is the direction we are going. We don’t want to create a low end 4K system. As with the F23 and F35 Sony intends to get 4K right.”

Sony will be evolving conversations around the proposed look of the system as well as colour manipulation and colour space at NAB “in order to differentiate our system from others,” he said. “The challenges are substantial but 4K is coming.”

[PhotoTraveler]

Right, like I said, no 4K tv's.

There has been 4K camera stuff for a while, what they do on motion picture/television camera systems doesn't matter to folks, nor the projector for it at the theater.

There is NHK (a public television network in japan apparently), talking about their studies where they determined the max res people can handle, and that was 33MP. Of course they were talking about 320 and 450" displays. That's a movie theater. And that's the limit of what folks could handle.

From Wiki, it looks like it is largely their little dream they are working. I don't see anything about an industry adoption or effort to this. Looks more like a group trying to go someplace no one else is heading.

The data transfer to do such a thing would be insane. It's a struggle right now doing the HD we have. They haven't even begun to try and broadcast 1080p. We are probably a decade away from even seeing all channels in 1080i. To do that will require uber new satellites, and replacing of the cable systems. From NHKs own work, they transmitted this all of 2 meters. That's a lot less than the distance to a geo-stationary satellite.

While there is little doubt things will increase over 1080p/i in time. That's one heck of a jump. Just look how far ahead monitors run over TVs, and they are no where near this yet. And before we get to this 4320p you can be sure we will go through many intermediate resolutions.

We very well can get there in time. But I'd give it 15-20 years minimum. I don't expect to even get to 2160i within 10 years. There is like 1 computer monitor right now that gets there and it cost 18 thousand.

Just think of this way. 33MP, that's almost 1.5x the resolution of a A900. And at 60fps. Right now just that res would slow an A900 down to 3fps. 20x slower than needed for this, and it can only do that for a bit before filling a buffer. Even with massive compression and decompression this will be hard, and take one heck of a processor to move this.

Also it looks like NHK has got ahead of themselves before. From wikipedia

" However, even that limited standardization of HDTV did not lead to its adoption, principally for technical and economic reasons. Early HDTV commercial experiments such as NHK's MUSE required over four times the bandwidth of a standard-definition (SDTV) broadcast, and despite efforts made to shrink the required bandwidth down to about two times that of SDTV, it was still only distributable by satellite. In addition, recording and reproducing a HDTV signal was a significant technical challenge in the early years of HDTV. Japan remained the only country with successful public broadcast analog HDTV, known as "Hi-vision", featuring a 5:3 aspect ratio screen with 1,125 interlaced lines (1,035 active lines) at the rate of 60 fields per second. The single satellite transponder MUSE service was turned off on January 1, 2007.
In Europe, analog 1,125-line HD-MAC test broadcasts were performed in the early 1990s, but did not lead to any established public broadcast service."

In short, don't hold your breath waiting for this.

[A1000]

analog movie theater projectors - optical - have about 1.5 K resolution

new digital projection standard is 2K, 2Kx2 3D, and 4K (8 MP). Digital postproduction is either 2K (2MP), or 4K, mostly from film, not digital media. 8 MP is here now. A number of theaters are being converted with Sony 4K (8MP) projectors.

NHK developed Hi Vision with Sony. UDTV is being developed also in cooperation with Ikegami. It is real. Just as they developed Hi Vision and digital HDTV and they put it into practice, they will do the same with UDTV. Japanese produce most of this equipment and they need to be constantly upgrading the standards; it means sales of new equipment to replace the old one.

Even Olympus introduced couple prototype 4K TV cameras.

Film is shot at 24p. Each frame is then recorded into two fields of the interlaced 1080i, for NTSC with pull/down, so 1080p is shown on HDTV, BluRay is coded directly in 1080p.

Sony developed camera and 1" VCR for Hi Vision about 25 years ago and it was commercially available; that was the first time video was experimentally used for film production. The camera nad the VCR was about 1/2 millon dollars. Curent Sony F35 camcorder has the same resolution and costs 1/4 million dollars.

There are no true 4K cameras yet. Red claims to make them, but actual resolution tests show equal resolution as Sony EX1 2K camcorders, costing $7K.