Extract From Byte Magazine - Nov 20 - PhotoPlus Expo 2003

[Steve Bildermann]

As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

After attending a string of computer shows that made me wonder why they'd been held, starting with last year's fall Comdex and continuing through the recent TechXNY, going off to a photo show to check out the latest in digital imaging was a real treat, and one that fell on Halloween at that.

The show was well attended, not so well that I had trouble getting around, but enough so that the vendors were very happy with the turnout. PhotoPlus isn't the biggest U.S. photo show that's a position held by PMA, the show of the Photographic Marketing Association, which will be held in Las Vegas this spring. It is, however, the last chance for manufacturers to release products in a significant forum before the end of the year, and there were a number of interesting things for me to stop and chat with company reps about. <continued>

[Steve Bildermann]

What struck me most about the state of the art is how digital and film have merged to become just plain photography. An ad for Canon's 12 MP (mega pixel) 1Ds showed a picture with the caption: "Film or Digital? We can't tell either." In a display of images by one news photographer, the comment was made in the caption paragraph that the photographer wasn't sure whether it had been taken with his Nikon F5 or a Nikon D1x, and throughout the show, it was clear that the question was moot. Editors have gotten used to accepting digital submissions for magazines, and only a few places, notably image bank Corbis, are holding onto digital specs that came from drum scanner technology rather than digital cameras.

The coolest thing, speaking as a photographer, was that when you saw people looking at the galleries of images set up on the show floor by printer makers or trade organizations, or the images from the new book "America 24/7" which chronicled a week in the life of the country and was displayed at Bryant Park, was that it never even crossed my mind that these people were looking for pixilation in the prints or digital artifacts or even trying to figure out if an image was digital or not. They were looking at the content, connecting with the people, places and things in the pictures. Their critical eyes were focused, not on the surface of the paper, or the technology behind it, but on the stories that were being told, and as photographic storytellers themselves, they were both a uniquely critical and receptive audience for the many images ranging from the terrible to the beautiful, and not infrequently blurring the line between the two.

But you didn't come here to listen to me wax poetic about photography. We're here to talk about the state of the art.

Digital SLRs


With the sensor from Canon's 10D and a price tag below $1000, the 6.3 MP Digital Rebel takes digital photography to the rest of us.

Breaking the price barrier is the new Canon Digital Rebel, or the D300, as it's known in Europe. For a mere $999, you get a 6.3 megapixel digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera, using the same sensor as the Canon 10D and a terrific medium (18 55 mm) zoom lens, mounted on a body that's lighter and more compact than the somewhat bulky 10D. I bought myself one, and I'm really pleased with it. To make it less camera than the 10D, and to address a different market, it uses more plastic in its construction, shoots slower (2.5 frames per second rather than 3) and doesn't include variable flash controls. Unless you're shooting sports or weddings, none of those things are likely to get in your way, and I've been very pleased with its performance. My wife, a former Canon SLR owner, remarked that it was the first digital camera she's used that let her forget it was digital.

I took the Digital Rebel to the show, and among other things, I was really impressed by how well it did in night shooting around the city. Even pushed up to its max 1600 ISO, the dark areas showed surprisingly little noise. If you already have Canon lenses and want to save a hundred bucks you can also buy it without a lens for $899, but I suggest that you get the lens, which will actually cover most of your shooting. It may not be intended as a pro camera, but I know at least one person shooting weddings with it, and it's more camera than I need for most of the photojournalism work I do.

Kodak's 14N was released late last year to mixed reviews, largely due to a lot of noise at ISO (film sensitivity equivalent) levels greater than 100, which is basically intended for portraiture. Now there's a firmware upgrade out and available on the web which addresses the noise, and a RAM upgrade which takes it from 3 4 images per burst up to 8 9 (in JPG). Kodak intended this camera for wedding and studio photographers though, and high speed and light sensitivity will never be its strong suit. Affordable resolution ($4500 for 14 MP) is what it's all about. The camera's ERI JPG format allows photographers to recover the information lost from raw files during JPG conversion. A new firmware upgrade to be launched "shortly" will address noise in dark areas without affecting skin tones, in a mode Kodak calls "Wedding." By the way, any rumors you may have heard that Kodak was giving up film just aren't true. Well, not for a while yet. Film continues to improve incrementally, but the future will be digitized. Only time will tell if the first name in film will also be the last.

Nikon, on the other hand, forges ahead, making speed and sensitivity the main issue with its new blazingly fast D2H. Like the original release of the D1H, releasing a zippy 4 MP camera probably heralds the release of a higher resolution D2X within the year, but naturally, they aren't talking. Meanwhile, they are determined to maintain their dominance of news and sports with a camera that doesn't just take pictures fast (8 frames per second for 40 frames) but one that does everything else just as quickly, making the "workflow" as quick as getting the image was. The turn on time is faster than I could move my finger to the shutter. Playback zips between shots. Focusing well, I'd need instrumentation to actually measure how fast it is, and not just for single area auto focus, but for dynamic tracking of an individual or group, as well as closest subject priority. The D2H uses an innovative white balance approach that takes information from the LBCAST Image sensor, the TTL metering system and a new external light sensor to determine the ambient light temperature. This allows unprecedented color accuracy under difficult shooting situations, especially where the background is monochromatic. In addition to all the new technology aimed at getting the picture into the camera, there's USB 2.0 and optional WiFi to get it out to wherever you need it to go. And besides all that, it's lighter and has more battery life than its predecessors.

I didn't intend to be impressed by the D2H. After all, it's only a 4 MP camera. But it's so loaded with good ideas and excellent implementation that I couldn't help myself.


Leica R8/9 Digital Back

Though not much data is available on it yet, Lecia is building a digital back for its R8 and R9 camera bodies, making it the first company to produce a camera that works with either film or digital. The camera will use a 10 MP sensor developed by Kodak.

The Olympus E1 is the first entry in the 4/3 digital SLR format, and started shipping on the October 1st, as promised. Now, 4/3 refers to the aspect ratio of the image, showing the move away from 35 mm film as a standard; its 1.5:1 format makes the image wider and causes black bars on the top and bottom of a computer screen. It's the first digital SLR built from the lens back for digital imaging, rather than to adapt film SLR technology to the job. Though it's only got a 4 MP sensor, that sensor was developed with Kodak to outperform higher resolution competitors, both with image quality and with speed.

Though a number of manufacturers are starting to develop lenses that address the different needs of image sensors rather than film, Olympus has been doing it since the introduction of their first digital SLR, the E10. Not only do digital sensors use only a portion of the area normal lenses focus on, sensors are more sensitive to the incoming angle of the light, and for best effect it needs to come in at right angles to the sensor. Film, on the other hand, is much more tolerant of incident angles, and normal lenses do not correct for this.

The sensor itself uses a Kodak designed data path which allows for more of the sensor area to be used for pixels and less for data transfer, resulting in both faster data transfer and better quality images. Dust is always a problem for sensors, and the E1 has an "ultrasonic filter" that moves particles away from the light wells.

One feature that's a problem for digital SLRs is that you can't preview the image on the LCD due to the through the lens light path to the eyepiece. Although the Olympus E10 and E20 used an optical splitter to make this happen, the E 1 doesn't because it's not practical with a wide range of lenses. Pity. Another feature lost in the transition is the pop up flash. Now, wanting a pop up flash isn't a very pro thing, but I find that they work well in crowded environments and miss them when they aren't there. Digital SLR designers clearly talked to old pros to see what it would take to convert them, rather than talking to new devotees to see what they wanted to bring along from the consumer digital camera experience. That will change.


Marching to the beat of their own drum, Pentax produced an excellent digital SLR for $1699.

At this point pretty much anyone who makes an SLR has a digital offering. One that really impressed me though was Pentax, which has been shipping its istD for the last forty days. It's a sharp 6.2 MP digital SLR with 200 3200 ISO, an additional battery pack that integrates with the internal battery rather than replacing it, well laid out external controls, and a $1699 price tag. The view finder is designed to match the CCD and has 0.95 times magnification and a 95 percent field of view. It's so bright and sharp it made me feel bad about the Canon Digital Rebel I was shooting with. The compact body uses a stainless steel chassis, and the camera feels solid and well balanced, but not heavy at 19.4 ounces without battery and storage media. They have no intention of taking over the world, just building the best camera they can and selling out their production runs. I don't think they'll have any problem.

Printers


The rumors are true. Epson released two archival pro quality printers at the show: left the Stylus Pro 4000, right the R800.

Two mind blowing printers got released from Epson. First, the 4000, which prints truly incredible 17" x 22" archival prints and sells for $1795, and second, the R800 which prints up to letter/legal size and 8.3 inch banners, but which matches the image quality of their renowned 2200.

The 4000 is another in Epson's long line of revolutionary printers. With it, a digital artist can produce archival artwork large enough for gallery viewing for less than the cost of a pro digital SLR. It's got its own cutting bar, so it can use roll stock, it can print on thick stock like poster board (up to 1.5 mm thick), and it prints almost twice as fast as previous Epson Stylus Pros. A 1440 x 720 dpi 8 x 10 image printed at three and a half minutes, though it can print at resolutions up to 2880 x 1440 at about twice that. In addition to fine art and magazine layout printing, the 4000 will be of interest to CAD/CAM users with its ability to print out a "C" size drawing. At 33.4 inches wide, 14 inches high and 30 inches deep, and weighing 83.7 pounds, it may be a bit big for your desk, but it's definitely worth making room for in your studio. The Stylus Pro 4000 will be available in January, but you'd better get in line if you want one.

If you can get by with a smaller print size, but image quality and longevity is important, take a look at the R800. It's got print output similar to the Epson 2200, but with a glossier "ultra chrome high gloss" 8 cartridge ink set. There are really only 6 colors in that set, as there are two different blacks (photo and matte) and a hard resin ultra clear shine that adds brilliance and durability to prints. Printing up to 5760 x 1440 dpi, and selling for $400, it won't be available until next February, but I'm looking forward to trying one out. The red and blue inks have been reformulated to increase the range of colors that the printer can produce and the manufacturer claims that the color gamut (range) on glossy paper is as much as 22 percent greater than on inkjet printers that use other inks. The R800 also prints on CDs, though you have to get the printable kind, which cost a little more. All in all, it lets you produce professional results for a consumer price. If you want to take your digital printing to pro levels on a budget, well, now you can.

Of course, there are lots of printer options for less than $400, but none of them offer archival prints that is, lightfastness of 100 years or more. On the other hand, many claim 25 years, and if you take a look at your family photos from the mid seventies, you may see some fading. Also, if you keep your pictures in an album, time stands mostly still for them, as it is the UV in sunlight that fades the pigments and dyes.

An excellent case in point is the Canon i960 released at the show, which prints a borderless 4 x 6 print at its maximum resolution of 4800 x 1200 dpi, in 36 seconds. It uses 6 ink cartridges which sell for $11.95 each, so you won't have to replace everything when the cyan runs out. The i960 sells for $199.95, and produces images that look as good as anything out there.

PhotoShop CS

Adobe Photoshop CS, which stands for Creative Suite but shouldn't be confused with the full Creative Suite package, which it's part of, comes with a lot of little tweaks and some major fixes: specifically a much more useful browser, a conversion to 16 bit color for almost all the tools and filters, and the incorporation of CameraRaw 2.0 (previously only available as a plug in), which allows users to work with raw camera files.

The file browser, long a sore point in an otherwise powerful package, is now faster and much more user configurable than before. Rotation, flagging, contact sheets, automated batch processing have all been either included or improved. CameraRaw 2.0 allows you to open and do simple manipulation of image files stored in camera's native formats, which include information that gets lost in the translation to even a non lossy format like TIFF. Working with raw files lets you perform some impressive tweaks in Photoshop CS, including lens aberration correction, color noise reduction, and 16 bit editing of images which contain 65k data points per color channel, as opposed to 256 points per camera. Working with raw provides two features I liked a lot: shadow detail correction, which brings up those dark areas using a special algorithm, and color cast correction, as well as color temperature (White Balance) adjustment. Images can be saved as either raw or TIFF in either 8 or 16 bit.

Once you're out of raw and into regular editing more new features come up: adjustable color filters, panoramic merging, curved path text, color matching between pictures, and a reworking of how Photoshop filters work together. It's a significant upgrade for most powerful tool in a digital photographer's arsenal, and well worth the $129 upgrade cost. If you don't have Photoshop, it will cost you $649.

Storage and Archiving Case Study: Metropolitan Museum of Art


"The next frontier is in image storage and retrieval," says Center for Digital Imaging VP Harold Goldstein.

The next frontier for digital photography isn't image acquisition; it's workflow and image management. Working with the Center for Digital Imaging, the Metropolitan Museum of Art knows that and has put together an initiative to digitize its collection and manage the results so that they get some use out of the images. The museum and the Center for Digital Imaging showcased their effort in a Digital Learning Center at the show, and I spoke to CDI VP Howard Goldstein to find out how they were approaching the project.

All the hardware involved in storage and image manipulation are from Apple: X Servers and 2.5 GB X Server Raid arrays. "The Raid connects to the X Server via fiber optics, so it's very fast, its very expandable, and it comes and you can keep adding arrays and X servers to meet your needs and it comes with everything built into OS X, so you've got an Apache Web server as well as the file serving, print serving, DNS, and DHCP," says Goldstein. Why not go with a Windows server? "When you compare this to what's out there in the corporate environment, you can go either way, and we've priced out a Dell Server and Raid storage solution versus this and the Apple solution was cheaper and had more functions integrated. This allows a small group to manage their own images with a Macintosh interface, which they're already comfortable with. Window clients can connect to this via Windows sharing, so both communities are comfortable with it. CD's are not a viable solution when you've got thousands of images."

Storing the images is actually the easy part. It's getting them back that turns out to be hard. Well, that's no surprise, because it involves users and IT departments working together.

At the small department level, software solutions include Canto Cumulus Workgroup or Extensis Portfolio. "Both are very good organizational platforms that work cross platform, with a server that works under OS X or Windows and a client," Goldstein reports. "They're good, but somewhat limited in scope and somewhat proprietary in the database schema. But good and affordable in the $2500 $4500 range." If your needs span more than the department level, what do you do? "The problem is that the middle tier has been empty until recently. You go up to IBM DB2, Oracle and all that, and those products start at $25,000 and go up from there. And they need to be custom programmed. So you need something that works out of the box, but allows for customization down the road."

And the answer is? "That's where MediaBeacon comes in. It's sold by a small company that doesn't do a lot of advertising, but Adobe turned me onto them," says Goldstein. "It's a server that runs on Solaris or OS10 currently, and it's got a Web based interface so it's totally cross platform. It uses MySQL, an open source SQL database, but mostly for performance, and it uses XML to store the metadata, which works great because XML is fast becoming the way information is stored across different Web applications. What's nice about storing the information in both MySQL and XML is that if one schema became corrupted, you could restore from either to the other. And you don't have to be an Oracle guru to install it. It works out of the box for about $15k, but it's customizable in HTML and JavaScript; you can customize it up the yin yang."

Conclusion

I certainly had fun checking out the latest photo gadgetry, and I'm pleased to note that the technology of digital imaging has reached a point where it's no longer as interesting for its own sake as it is for what you can do with it. Talking to representatives from the two best known photography workshops in the country, the Maine Photographic Workshop and the Santa Fe Workshop, I found that about 20 percent of all students are now showing up with digital cameras. I'd bet that as recently as 3 years ago that percentage wasn't any higher than 1 or 2. What hasn't changed is that they're all photographers, regardless of the medium.

[Caustic Saint]

Man, every time I see the EOS 300D (Kiss Digital/Digital Rebel) I want one. I don't need that much camera, but damn, do I want it.