Kodak and Canon have both announced a full sized 35mm Chip for digital cameras.

I was wandering whether this same principle could be applied to digital video cameras. I.e. putting a 35mm chip in a MiniDV camcorder.

If so would this be achievable, or would there be no point to it. I guess it would increase the resolution, so we could blow up the picture to cinema size for showing?

Any views would be appreciated.

All the best,

Ed Smith

I don't think you could put it in a min DV camera for several reasons. The format could not handle the amount of data (I believe those chips are around 11 megapixel). The size would certainly not be very mini. You would need 3 chips and the prism and cooling would require a much larger physical size. Power requirements would force a change to 12 volts or the run time would be too short. But the industry is certainly headed that way.

Jeff

Not to mention the cost!!! You may as well go out and buy a Sony 24p HD Cam. I think in the near future we'll see consumer chips getting bigger but q 35mm chip at a consumer or even prosumer price is still a bit of a way off. However, herr in Japan technology moves so quickly there is a good chance I am wrong. You just never know.

Thanks Wanglers.

It was just an idea. But as you rightly say, you just never know in that industry.

Thanks guys

All the best,

Ed Smith

Ed,

The stuff happening here in Japan at the moment is amazing. Talking to some of the engineers at Hitachi who develop CCDs is interesting. I'd say that the next two years are going to be really interesting in the terms of improvements in imaging technology.

From what they are saying 4000 line video resolution is not too far away. It won't be in consumer/prosumer cameras but that isn't to say that there won't be improvements. The Japanese are digital camera crazy, both still and video. They have cameras in their cell phones, I saw a video cell phone the other day for god sakes, and the picture looked quite good.

The bottom line is good things come to those who wait.

When this eventually happens, I'm sure the DV format will have been replaced by then. Our Mini-DV cassettes will be in the archives.

The cost of the Canon EOS-1DS which uses a 35mm-sized 11.1 megapixel CCD, is over $9000 for the body alone. So it'll be awhile before this technology goes to video.

Back when I still owned my post company a Minolta salesman came calling to see if I was interested in a digital still camera with interchangeable lenses. Minolta had just dropped the price on the RD-175 body to $9,995 The year was 1995 and the price dropped nearly in half. Minolta thought we could use them to make story boards such. The camera was a whopping 1.7 megapixels. I think the resolution was slight larger than 640 x 480 and just think, under $10,000. I passed on that great camera.

Today a 2.1 megapixel camera can be purchased for under $200. It doesn't offer interchangeable lenses like the RD-175 but the picture quality is better. In ten years or less I think you'll see chips with near 35mm size and quality in under $5,000 video cameras. It's only a matter of time.

Jeff

Chris, you are right when you say DV tapes days are nunbered, even the format can see the tunnel begining to darken. However, I don't think we'll see much in the way of optical disk based cameras. The formats are too limiting. With the current rate of increase in HDD technology, I think it won't bee too long before we see a camera with a 40GB+ HDD based recording system. With HDDs the size of DV tapes increasing in size, ie Apple's IPOD, these will surley find their way into DV cameras in the near future. These engineers over here love small high tech gadgets and these "microdrives" sure fit the bill.

I agree that DV days are numbered. Certainly when the manufacturers can produce a cheap and small hard drive that will quicken the end. Still as far as development cycles go that will likely be a minimum of 3 years away.

One of the questions that might be neat to ask Canon, et al, "is the limiting factor imaging or storage?"

Personally I cannot wait for the end of tape. All the movies I buy
are on DVD and my own tries are going directly to CD/DVD too.
Harddisk recording would be really sweet, but we will have to
wait a bit more for that to become mainstream I think. My new
digital still camera has Compact Flash memory too. Sweet. Got
me 256 & 128 MB cards and can store nearly 400 photos in
glorious detail without having to develop them. Sweet!

As long as the camera can mount PL lenses, and have variable shutter and frame speed. I'm there. Okay, I don't need the last two things, just the PL mount.

J

A 35mm CCD would give fantastic control over depth of field. It would also mean that camcorders could be compatible with standard 35mm lenses without multiplying the image size, as is the case with the XL1. A converter of some kind would still be needed to make the image from the lens CCD beam-splitter friendly, but if enough people wanted it, such a gizmo could be built into the camera!

and on an environmental note, less lenses would need to be manufactured, conserving our planet's valuable and ever diminishing resources

aside: do you guys not have picture messaging in the states? it is just taking off here in the UK, and Nokia are launching a phone that will stream video

personally, I don;t give a damn about a camera in phone as i'm sure the resolution & quality is dire. I'm just waitng for when they come with GPS as standard, so when I'm lost on my way to a party, I can find my way there!

Yes, GPS on cell phones would be great. Unfortunately, there is a debate here in the US about privacy and users civil liberties. Authorities can still issue a warrant for information about a person's location via cell towers, but it is still at the phone companies discretion as to releasing that information.

I'm doing some cell phone software design work, so this information is at the top of my brain heap.

One thought on 35mm CCD's for video, the data thruput would be absolutely overwhelming. You'd need a dedicated CPU ala 2Gig P4 to process and compress the data. Data compression would be required to fit it on some storage media and have suitable recording time. I suspect the overall data thruput would exceed the current DV standard of 3Mb/sec. In the end, the resolution stored would be less than what was captured.

billravens wrote:
"In the end, the resolution stored would be less than what was captured."

No problem. That's what we have already.

GPS phones have been on the market her ein Japan for about 8 months. Video phones have been around for about the same time in various forms as well.

I may be wrong, but I think the GPS and triangulation of a location are two seperate issues. I remember hearing about the privacy concerns several years ago, but I thought it was probably resolved by now.

Jeff

<<<-- Originally posted by Adrian Douglas : Ed,

The stuff happening here in Japan at the moment is amazing. Talking to some of the engineers at Hitachi who develop CCDs is interesting. I'd say that the next two years are going to be really interesting in the terms of improvements in imaging technology.

From what they are saying 4000 line video resolution is not too far away. It won't be in consumer/prosumer cameras but that isn't to say that there won't be improvements. The Japanese are digital camera crazy, both still and video. They have cameras in their cell phones, I saw a video cell phone the other day for god sakes, and the picture looked quite good.

The bottom line is good things come to those who wait. -->>>

A bit off topic (or maybe not) but when I was in Japan in August I saw an article in a newpaper about cameras in cell phones. The article quoted a source which said the cell phone cum camera had become a great boon for teenage prostitution. :-) Just another commercial adjunct, I guess.
Sandy

This sort of thing is for true digital film like Star Wars Episode II and beyond. Like everything else, I'm sure consumers will benefit from it someday, but not today.

Interesting comments all round... some things I've been wondering myself.

I think there is probably an equation which sums this all up nicely:

An idea times the number of people talking about it = the square root of some geek who has already been working on it for months times a factor of greed and timed release (like those cold capsules... except that new technology is always brought in little by little, being careful not to skip steps that might take our money away - how's that for cynical Sunday morning...)

I also liked the comment about fewer lenses being manufactured helping to save the environment. Be nice if companies were actually that responsible, but capitalism just doesn't seem to want to work that way. Produce and consume baby.

As far as recording to HD goes, Sony has the DSR-DU1 already that looks quite sweet.

Ken

<<A bit off topic (or maybe not) but when I was in Japan in August I saw an article in a newpaper about cameras in cell phones. The article quoted a source which said the cell phone cum camera had become a great boon for teenage prostitution. :-) Just another commercial adjunct, I guess.>>

The kicker about technology is the fact that it has a human-side. Leave it to journalists to pinpoint the "boon to teenage prostitution" aspect when there are god-knows-how-many positive applications for it. Whatever sells newspapers, I guess.