New image sensor

Foveon announced their X3 sensor to be used in a new Sigma digital

SLR. The new sensor captures all three colors in each pixel.

This could lead to a big improvement in image quality.

See the write up at

http://www.dpreview.com

Herb

Here is the manufacturer's link for more information on the first camera which utilizes it. Does anyone know or assume how digital underwater photography could benefit from this "higly hyped" CCD ? Or do you think that improved algorythms for whitebalancing (like in the new Canon D60) are more important to good image quality?

The white balance is not an issue. With a D60 or even a G2 you can shoot in the

raw mode and do the white balance over and over in photoshop afterwards until

you're happy with the results.

The conventional sensors both CMOS and CCD use a RGB checker pattern of color

filters to make color images. A pixel is either Red, Green or Blue,

and an interpolation algorithm is used to get the other two colors from its

neighbors. This cannot be done perfectly if you want the full resolution

implied by the number of pixels. It's always a tradeoff between sharpness and

color errors. The classic demo is color fringes on a digital image of a pattern

of closely spaced black and white lines. See for example

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneosd60/page22.asp

and look closely at the patterns at the bottom of the page.

The X3 sensor should not have these problems, but its resolution is

also not as good as the D60. There are lots of issues that are hard to

speculate on until the camera's out and tests are done.

Herb

Originally posted by herbko

The white balance is not an issue. With a D60 or even a G2 you can shoot in the

raw mode and do the white balance over and over in photoshop afterwards until

you're happy with the results.

I wonder if the raw mode has any practical use underwater? According to my latest information it offers many possibibilties and supreme quality but needs to save the UNCOMPRESSED IMAGE DATA - which is huuuuuuuuge. Does anyone know from experience how big an umcompressed D60 image is? How long does it take until it is stored on a microdrive? Same questions for the G2... If I can't shoot my 80 images during one dive I am loosing one of the main digital advantages.

If you can convince me on this, you might convice me to convert to canon .oOo. hehe Andi

Hi,

the manual for my Sony P5 (3,2 Megapixel) describes the filesize as about 16 mb.

Not to mention the long time of writing the data...

chironex

... for the D60 will bring u to an output of about 30 pictures per dive.

chironex

...but not as bad as I tought. Does the image buffer reduce the writing time?

How many pictures per minute are possible?

chironex: was this experience or calculated theory?

I'd love to hear eric's experience on the D60.

Actually, this is something that I've been looking at all week.

First we need to clarify that raw is not tiff. For the Olympus E-20, raw files are 10MB, whereas TIFF files are like 17MB. This means that my microdrive holds over 100 raw shots. For the E-20, write time is 17 seconds for a raw file. For most situations, I consider that acceptable.. the buffer holds three before you have to wait to for a write to complete.

Raw files are 16bit color, with no color balance or other processing done by the camera.

There is a rather unique raw converter available at http://www.bibblelabs.com

Looks like it currently supports the d30 so I suspect D60 support is in the pipeline.

RAW flies are compressed on the D60. A 6 MP uncompressed TIFF file is 18 megabytes, but this doesn't exactly carry over, since Canon's CRW format is 10-bit, and proprietary. If I switch my camera over to RAW at ISO 100, the counter says I can shoot 140 photos with a 1gb microdrive.

I don't shoot in RAW mode myself, because I'd rather not have to open up my housing to get to the Microdrive between dives.

I use Breezebrowser (http://www.breezesys.com) for RAW conversion. It's awesome. I haven't used Bibble myself, but word on the street is that they're falling behind vs. Breezebrowser and YarcPlus.

[Edited on 5-12-2002 by echeng]