Hrm ... mistake?

[Javelin]

Barry first spotted this and called it a mistake then this turned up shortly after

[Greg Beetham]

I think Barry F might be on the mony there, trust him too spot a mistake somewhere.
HD hmm I don't think in this case it's referring too high density, when they are talking about internal 8GB memory/hard disk... not when you can get CF cards for DSLR's that go from 1GB to 16 or even 32GB.....and 8 hours of continuous recording...ooops!
Greg

[Greg Beetham]

Isn't it time the US went by by's, looking at my world time clock it's 1.00am in Kansas City.
Greg

[Greg Beetham]

It's 1:13 AM here in Rockford...I'll be up most of the night watching Galveston, Texas and other Gulf Coast cities and towns get smashed New Orleans style by Hurricane Ike on Fox and CNN...

BTW, 3 hours on 8GB is HandyCam HD style video.

Okey dokey, I'll take your word for it, I don't know hardly anything about video.

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/sto ... &langId=-1

-Sonolta

What's with the US lately ?? if it's not freezing under some missdirected glacier, the middle area getting flooded repeatedly, getting churned by some Tornado, half of California going up in smoke and under threat of Earthquakes or Volcano thingys, it's Hurricanes one after the other. Sheesh
Greg

[David Kilpatrick]

This could be a spoof mockup, but the question was put to Paul Genge after he made a joke about the D90 - 'how soon before you have to eat your words?', said one of the journalists in the hands-on workshop. Paul just sort of looked, and said, well you'll have to wait and see (i.e. 'I'm saying nothing right now').

The assumption was that this answer means Sony will do it. Someone then said that the Sony sensors might not be capable. Paul said nothing. I chipped in and said that as far as I knew, the Sony IMX021 sensor was also used by Nikon, and was the basis of the sensor in the D90. Paul replied that the Nikon and Sony sensors were not as far as he knew the same (this is a standard Sony-scripted reply to this question - we know for certain that the D300 and A700 sensors are functionally identical and the v4 firmware upgrade has proved it).

Interestingly, during the press conference it emerged that the Nikon EXPEED processor is actually a rebranded Sony BIONZ, which I did not realise. The processor goes with the sensor. So one side was saying, no, the sensors are not necessarily the same - the other side admitting that Sony supplies the processor, so it's hardly likely the sensors are really very different. The D90 sensor is pinout-ed or wired differently to the D300 though it is clearly still an IMX021 derivative.

I think that whether or not the image is a leak, an error, a spoof or something we shall see at photokina - the Alpha 800 - it's coming for certain and Sony will, in this implementation, prove better than Nikon. Some of the wording on the graphic looks too authentic to Sony to be made up. Also, it appears to indicate twin BIONZ processors. Now they have built the processor board with the back-to-back design (it is the same size as the original BIONZ board, but has a mirrored set of components on its reverse side - two entire boards running in parallel) it would make sense to use it for video.

David

[KevinBarrett]

I'm wondering where an 8cm DVD will fit in an a900 body... I'm also having a hard time understanding which parts of this are still in question when the rest of you talk about its possible authenticity.

[PhotoTraveler]

David, could you expand on this image processor bit? How this came about in the talks and such. This would cause an uproar in a Nikon forum. I'm sure the world of no it all Nikon people would freak out an deny it. One particular famous DPR Nikon Troll I'm sure would start launching fireballs at the idea.

[David Kilpatrick]

It was head in a conversation between one of the Japanese technical staff and an journalist - discussing the dual BIONZ. There was no argument, no question and answer, it was stated as a matter of fact and the conversation moved on. I don't think it was misunderstood. I did not think much further about it. All the image processors are proprietary units and Nikon has to get their from somewhere - they don't manufacture ICs as far as I know. Since the IMX021 chip has a certain protocol and Nikon use the chip, it would make sense that in the D300 and D90 anyway the EXPEED was a BIONZ under another name. Similar reasons - the EXPEED in the D3 might be something (and probably is something) unrelated, unless Sony is making that chip for Nikon, in which case they probably make the processor too.

Sony calls all its processors BIONZ but it does not mean they are all identical - Nikon calls all its processors EXPEED, ditto. I do not think the discussion meant that every EXPEED is a BIONZ, just that Sony does sell the BIONZ unit to Nikon where it appears in some DSLRs as an EXPEED.

I am not sure, but this comment may possibly be present on my audio recording of the hands-on workshop with Q&A. If it is, I will transcribe it into the report.

David

[Greg Beetham]

Unless my memory is playing tricks or something, I'm fairly sure I saw somewhere that intel designed and built the Bionz processor from the ground up for Sony, (besides I didn't think Sony had a processor fab, building a processor is a really big deal, an incredibly more complex task than making imaging chips).
Sooo, if this is true, Nikon could have talked to Sony and intel about the processor, (or just went to intel direct), and came up with an "expeed" version.
Greg

[David Kilpatrick]

That could also be the meaning of the conversation - that both processors were just rebrands of one common item. I did not hear it said that Sony made the BIONZ, only that the Nikon EXPEED was the same item, but it was in the same context as Sony supplying sensors to Nikon. Is building a processor really more complex than making imaging sensors?

David

[PhotoTraveler]

Yeah, this could be interesting.

It was only recently a thread at DPR came up with some of the usual suspects trying to get the world thinking that Nikon is helping Sony on their image pipeline and basically implied the reverse of this, nikon make the software or processor for Sony, not the other way. Of course, they are nikon folks.

I agree that it makes sense being the same basic chip. In the end, every brands image processor is basically just a dedicated DSP with various functions packed into it. The Expeed, Digic, Bionz is just a general name for them all, even though every body probably carried tweaked ones except when not needed (A350 And A300 probably have the same one).

If figured in the past that this could be going on as I would expect the image processor and sensor to be much like the chipset and cpu in motherboards. Generally they are a matched platform, but you can go develop your own chipset if you want. I would think Sony makes them as a package to let integrators develop products much more quickly. But if the integrator wants to take a deviation, they can.

I suspect much of what you see in the nikons, such as the 14bit stuff very well is capability Sony has in their kit, but just doesn't use it in house on Alphas.

I don't think there is any intel connection here. That came up long ago as a rumor about what the 2 companies could be doing and there was never anything else to it. I'm not sure if any of it was supported, or if there was an actual deal there, but what the deal was, was unknown and people ran with it. We do know that the sensors are done in Japan. I really doubt sony would separate development like that.

If only the camera community was like the mac community with people buying the first of every new model and doing tear downs and posting everything and the chips in the products and such. I think that could be a good website. There is a nice even flow of cameras. And I think the site would actually calm so much fighting down as people find that so much stuff is shared among brands. Don't know if you could get enough add revenue though when you start getting to Pro bodies, those cost a lot to buy and dismantle. Of course, some abuse test reviewing should come first. When the world starts to see the rear LCDs are all made by one company (Sony-Samsung). The shutters by another (copol). The built in ram another (samsung), sensors by Sony and a few others, chips in each brands camera by all sorts of electronic houses. Card slots by the same company all around, so on and so forth. You could probably off set some cost by keeping the parts in good shape and selling them to owners as they break theirs. Maybe come up with some tear down guides in the process.

[Greg Beetham]

You could very well be right PT, I waded through as much old Sony press releases and technobabbel as I could stand in an effort too uncover the original one that I dimly rember, the only reference to the microprocessor development I could consistantly unearth was in relation to the LSI tecnology (Large Scale Intergration, also used in the processors in the KM7D-5D) with Sony in collaboration variously with IBM, NEC and Toshiba too develop this line further, presumably for the "Bionz" processor, although that wasn't confirmed. I'm fairly sure Toshiba has a fab for processors and IBM certainly does (many), there was plenty of info connected with the development of the "cell" processor for their playstation3 (apparently using IBM and Toshiba resources), but no reference to any admitted collaboration with intel, that I could find (from a Sony perspective).
Greg
btw Just for interest sake here is an example of the complexity and cost of producing a new model processor.

Quote from Wikipedia
Developing new, high-end CPUs is a very costly proposition. Both the logical complexity (needing very large logic design and logic verification teams and simulation farms with perhaps thousands of computers) and the high operating frequencies (needing large circuit design teams and access to the state-of-the-art fabrication process) account for the high cost of design for this type of chip. The design cost of a high-end CPU will be on the order of US $100 million. Since the design of such high-end chips nominally takes about five years to complete, to stay competitive a company has to fund at least two of these large design teams to release products at the rate of 2.5 years per product generation.

As an example, the typical loaded cost for one computer engineer is often quoted to be $250,000 US dollars/year. This includes salary, benefits, CAD tools, computers, office space rent, etc. Assuming that 100 engineers are needed to design a CPU and the project takes 4 years.

Total cost = $250,000/engineer-man_year X 100 engineers X 4 years = $100,000,000 US dollars.

The above amount is just an example. The design teams for modern day general purpose CPUs have several hundred team members.

Only the personal computer mass market (with production rates in the hundreds of millions, producing billions of dollars in revenue) can support such a large design and implementation teams.[citation needed] As of 2004, only four companies are actively designing and fabricating state of the art general purpose computing CPU chips: Intel, AMD, IBM and Fujitsu.[citation needed] Motorola has spun off its semiconductor division as Freescale as that division was dragging down profit margins for the rest of the company. Texas Instruments, TSMC and Toshiba are a few examples of a companies doing manufacturing for another company's CPU chip design.