Digital Camera Technology - IQ !?

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pocketmoon66

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I have a Kodak DC280 digital camera. It's 2MP camera with a best IQ image size of 1760x1168. I've had it since september 1999 :)

It's takes loverly pics like this :

http://www.wavestate.com/car.jpg

I bought a new Kodak 2MP camera for my son. It's cheap, < 100 quid, and the quality is terrible compared to my 5 year old Kodak, which you pick up on ebay for about 60 quid!

I've started to look at the latest super digitals with 8MP's and 8x zoom etc and even the comparison pics the manufactures put online look worse than my camera. For instance, look how noisy the sky is in this (BIG PIC):


http://img2.dpreview.com/gallery/sonydscf828_samples/originals/040106-0946-16-raw.jpg


What's happened to sensor technology ?!
 
Not all camera's were created equally. When you buy a cheaper camera you get cheaper parts.
 
AlphaWolf said:
Not all camera's were created equally. When you buy a cheaper camera you get cheaper parts.
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Sure, but I'm suprised a 5 year old 2mp sensor gives better quality than a new 2004 camera. The newer ccd's give much higher effecive resolution but appear to produce noisier images to my eye.
 
Resolution isn't everything, just remember that. A lot of companies hype the MP spec because it looks good as a marketing number. However some camera's don't even have the optics to handle the high resolution so you get soft pics. Others have shoddy image processing circuitry so the images have ugly color and/or noise.
 
pocketmoon66 said:
AlphaWolf said:
Not all camera's were created equally. When you buy a cheaper camera you get cheaper parts.
Click to expand...

Sure, but I'm suprised a 5 year old 2mp sensor gives better quality than a new 2004 camera. The newer ccd's give much higher effecive resolution but appear to produce noisier images to my eye.
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Yes - that's exactly the problem of small sensors with high resolution, and the sony dsc-f828 (which your 2nd example picture was taken with) has been widely criticized for exactly that problem. Take a look for example at Canon A70 or Minolta Dimage Xt. Only 3 MP, but less noise.
 
pocketmoon66 said:
I have a Kodak DC280 digital camera. It's 2MP camera with a best IQ image size of 1760x1168. I've had it since september 1999 :)
.....
I've started to look at the latest super digitals with 8MP's and 8x zoom etc and even the comparison pics the manufactures put online look worse than my camera. For instance, look how noisy the sky is ...
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That's just it: as the individual pixel sensors become smaller they also become noiser. I'm sure there's probably some law of thermodynamics that's related to this. :?

Of course, if you down filter that high resolution image to one of the same size as output by your old camera you'd probably eliminate much of the noise.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that the manufacturers will use a larger piece of silicon (i.e. more pixels but with the same size of sensor element as the "old days") simply because of cost. That would be ideal for me - I'd love a replacement back for my SLR camera but only if the sensor array was the same area as a normal negative.
 
More pixels -> more sensors -> smaller sensors -> sensor is less sensitive to light as less light hits on a cell -> noise
 
It is also worth noting that there is a good chance that the sensor in your sons camera is a CMOS sensor rather than a CCD. They tend to be cheaper to produce but aren't generally as good.


I don't know about the compact cameras but the digital SLR cameras are all standardizing the sensor size to be the same size as an APS film, which is about 1.7 times smaller than standard 35mm film (so about 20mm)

CC
 
Actually the CCD in most consumer level DCs are not much larger than a peanut, literally.
This is the main reason why I am considering a DSLR: they have APS size (or even larger) sensors. Their noise levels are much lower than normal consumer level DCs under the same light condition.
 
Also remember that a lot of mega-pixel cameras store pictures in JPEG format. This means they are using lossy compression to store the pictures, which will inevitably introduce artefacts and 'noise', depending on the level of compression used. I'd guess that some of them use a lot more compression than others, especially as the resolution increases.
 
my phone (1mp) takes pics like this

gill.bmp


dang it no clue why its not showing up right
 
Lezmaka said:
If you didn't look at the pic because it's a .bmp, you might want to do it anyway. It's a nice picture :)
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dunno whats so nice about it . Just the hudson river (jersey side) where i go to fish and think all the time .
 
Interesting and relevent :)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3958138/

Perhaps most important, the sensors on Spirit's CCDs are bigger, explained Patrick Myles, director of corporate communication at the Dalsa Corporation, which built the CCDs for all of the rover's cameras (Spirit has nine altogether, including hazard avoidance cameras and a microscopic imager).

A Sony DSC-F717, with a street price of around $600, has 5.2 million sensors (or 5 megapixels) on a chip that is 8.8 by 6.6 millimeters (or .35 by .26 inches). The Pancam has just a million sensors spread across a chip that's 12 by 12 millimeters — nearly a half-inch square.

Each tiny Pancam sensor, measured in microns, is nearly four times as big as those on the Sony.

In the consumer market, which Dalsa does not target, 5-megapixel cameras often use the same size CCD as a 3-megapixel camera. More pixels are simply crammed onto the same-size chip.

"The pixels themselves get smaller," Myles said. "This has an impact on image quality."

Why? For one thing, smaller pixels are less light-sensitive.

Also, the lens quality might not support the additional pixels. As the receptors get smaller, a higher quality lens is needed to properly focus light onto each pixel. So where each pixel ought to capture different light information — say perhaps a subtle shading change on the subject's cheek — the same information can get spread across several pixels after passing through a lower quality lens.
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[/quote]
 
Sonic said:
Who is the girl JVD, your girlfriend?
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No although she is sleeping in my bed :cry:

Its my sisters roomate . She is staying with us till the end of the week when she goes back to london. Really nice girl . She wanted to just chill one day so I took her to the parks on the hudson . Its really nice u can see the gw bridge all the way down to the empire state building .
 
I must say that even my 5M pixels Sony T1 can produce quite noisy pictures... Especially in low light conditions... Very strange...
 
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