35 mm movie film cameras vs HD cameras

[Davros]

I love my 20D to death

Bah....
Ive got one of these and its fantastic
even has a High quality mode of 352 x 288 pixels

 

[MfA]

pcchen: bayer-mask sensors have half color resolution only in theory. Low-pass optical filter and in-camera processing has huge impact and causes additional loss of color detail.

While leaving off pre-filters from a camera with a Foveon sensor will not result in quite as aliased results as with a Bayer sensor it's still not something to be altogether proud of, especially for video (aliasing effects are not shift invariant).

 

[RudeCurve]

If I recall correctly from a conversation in the office a few years back with someone who'd looked into the issue, there are two problems caused by the pixel sensors getting smaller.

The first is that fewer and fewer photons can hit the sensor so that the recorded values are inherently becoming noisier and noisier. Related to this is that each pixel 'bucket' can only hold so much 'charge' and so you lose dynamic range. As soon as some % of pixels become fully exposed, the picture has to be finished.

The manufacturers, of course, don't want to spend silicon on a bigger sensor but appear to be locked in an almost senseless resolution arms race. <shrug>

Of course, take all of the above with a grain of salt.

Fujifilm has a new sensor that helps to solve this problem.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08092210fujifilmexr.asp

 

[Humus]

They've released the F200EXR with that sensor just weeks ago. I'm quite excited about the HDR sensor, or WDR (Wide Dynamic Range) as they call it, giving an 800% expanded dynamic range.
I found some samples here which I found fairly convincing, although the EXIF seems to hint that some picture are not straight out of the camera (showing Adobe Lightroom rather than the camera name, but the first sample pair both shows the camera name so I'm going to assume they are unprocessed).

 

[no-X]

Fuji has technologies, which are very nice on paper or in synthetic tests, but reality can be a bit different. The last generation of their CCDs had very good dynamic range, but only in luminance channel. R pixels weren't covered by the bayer mask so they collect only luminance info. So... if you take picture of a red reflective flower in direct sunlight, there won't white highlights. There won't be even pink highlights, but the highlights will be light-grey. Because S pixel, which collects colour information, is out of its DR , so only luminance info from R pixel is available for that area...

 

[Zaphod]

Those flaws seems to be the result of ditching their previous strategy with the latest round of sensors as they finally caved to the "megapixel race". As far as their compacts go, while the luminance resolution doubled, their ability to actually take good pictures in a variety of sub-optimal lighting conditions still seems to be down from the generation which culminated with the (still quite excellent) 6MP F31fd. I'll be curious to see whether this new thing can bring back (or even improve on) that performance at the higher resolution.