We had a great time in Anaheim this past weekend checking out the Photo Marketing Association’s trade show spectacle. Hundreds of cameras and thousands of pictures later, we’re finally back and getting settled. Let’s take a look back at all that we saw this week, and then kind of wrap up a few loose ends.

GE’s ‘Create by Jason Wu’ camera collection unveiled, we go hands on
Joby Gorillapod Magnetic flexible tripod hands-on
Nikon CoolPix ‘Style’ and ‘Life’ series hands-on
Pentax’s rugged W90, ultra-zoom X90 now all but official
Samsung TL500 and TL350 hands-on
Samsung PMA roundup: hands on HMX-U20, eyes on AQ100 and SL605
Sony Alpha ultra-compact concept hands-off: leaves much to the imagination
Sony’s ultra-durable DSC-TX5 hands-on: ice, ice, baby
Sigma trio espied at PMA, COO expresses interest in supporting ‘mirrorless camera systems’

PMA 2010… and that’s a wrap, folks originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Turns out Nikon’s CoolPix P100 is quite a beaut, and our brief time taking snapshots with the compact superzoom at PMA yielded some pretty good pics with relative ease — guess Ashton’s onto something, after all, if you’re not looking for something pocketable. Also of note is the incredibly sturdy articulating display, a great value-add to the $400 piece. Check out more glamor shots below.

Nikon CoolPix P100 (and its articulating display) hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In 1975, the first digital camera took 23 seconds to record a 100-line black-and-white photo onto cassette tape. Today, a Nikon D3s takes photos with 12 million pixels at 1/8000 of a second. And it can see in the dark.

The conventional wisdom is that the romp-stomp-stomp of progress in digital imaging has proceeded on the mostly one-way track of ballooning pixel counts. Which wasn’t always a pointless enterprise. I mean, 1.3-megapixel images, like you could take in 1991, aren’t very big. The Nikon D1, introduced in 1999, was the digital camera that “replaced film at forward-looking newspapers.” It was $5,000 and shot 2.7 megapixel images using a CCD sensor, large enough for many print applications. But still, there was room to grow, and so it did. Now pretty much every (non-phone) camera shoots at least 10-megapixel pictures, with 14 megapixels common even in baseline point-and-shoots. Cheap DSLRs from Canon are now scratching 18MP as standard. Megapixels were an easy-to-swallow specification to pitch in marketing, and became the way normal people assessed camera quality.

The now-common geek contrarianism is that more megapixels ain’t more better. The new go-to standard for folks who consider themselves savvy is low-light performance. Arguably, this revamped arms race was kickstarted by the D3, Nikon’s flagship DSLR that forsook megapixels for ISO. (Rumor had it that the D3 and D300 led Canon to shitcan their original, middling update to the 5D, pushing full-steam-ahead for a year to bring us the incredible 5D Mark II.) However it began, “amazing low-light performance” is now a standard bullet point for any camera that costs more than $300 (even if it’s not true). Nikon and Canon’s latest DSLRs have ISO speeds of over 100,000. Welcome to the new image war.

How a Camera Sees

The name of the game, as you’ve probably gathered by now, is collecting light. And in fact, the way a digital camera “sees” actually isn’t all that different from the way our eyeballs do, at one level. Light, which is made up of photons, enters through a lens, and hits the image sensor (that boring looking rectangle above) which converts it into an electrical signal, sorta like it enters through an eye’s lens and strikes the retina, where it’s also converted into an electrical signal. If nothing else after this makes sense, keep this in mind: The more light an image sensor can collect, the better.

When a camera is spec’d at 10 megapixels, it’s not just telling you that its biggest photos will contain about 10 million pixels. Generally, it’s also telling you the number of photosites, or photodiodes on the image sensor; confusingly, these are also often referred to as pixels. Photodiodes are the part of the sensor that’s actually sensitive to light, and if you remember your science, a photodiode converts light (photons) into electricity (electrons). The standard trope for explaining photosites is that they’re tiny buckets left out in a downpour of photons, collecting the light particles as they rain down. As you might expect, the bigger the photosite, the more photons it can collect at the moment when it’s exposed (i.e., when you press the shutter button).

Image sensors come in a range of sizes, as you can see in this helpful diagram from Wikipedia. A bigger sensor, like the full-frame slab used in the Canon 5D or Nikon D3, has more space for photosites than the thumbnail-sized sensor that fits in little point-and-shoots. So, if they’re both 12-megapixels, that is, they both have 12 million photosites, the bigger sensor can obviously collect a lot more light per pixel, since the pixels are bigger.

If you’re grasping for a specification to look for, the distance between photosites is referred to as pixel pitch, which roughly tells you how big the photosite, or pixel, is. For instance, a Nikon D3 with a 36mm x 23.9mm sensor has a pixel pitch of 8.45 microns, while a Canon S90 point-and-shoot with a 7.60 mm x 5.70 mm sensor has a pitch of 2 microns. To put that in less math-y terms, if you got the same amount of light to hit the image sensors the D3 and the S90—you know, you took the exact same exposure—the bigger pixels in the D3 would be able to collect and hold on to more of the light. When you’re looking for low-light performance, it’s immediately obvious why that’s a good thing.

Catch More Light, Faster, Faster

Okay, so that’s easy enough: As an axiom, larger photodiodes result in more light sensitivity. (So with the 1D Mark IV, Canon kept the same photodiode size, but the shrunk the rest of the pixel to fit more of them on the same-size chip as its predecessor). There’s more to an image sensor than simply photosites, though, which is why I called up Dr. Peter B. Catrysse from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. The “ideal pixel,” he says, would be flat-just an area that collects light-nearly bare silicon. But even at a basic level, a silicon photodiode sits below many other structures and layers including a micro lens (which directs light onto the photodiode), a color filter (necessary, ’cause image sensors are in fact color blind) and the metal wiring layers inside each pixel. These structures affect the amount of light that the photodiode “sees.” So one way manufacturers are improving sensors is by trying to make all of these structures as thin as possible-we’re talking hundreds of nanometers-so more light gets through.

One major way that’s happening, he says, is with back-illuminated sensors, which move the wiring to the back-side of the silicon substrate, as illustrated in this diagram by Sony. It’s currently still more expensive to make sensors this way, but since more light’s getting through, you can use smaller pixels (and have more of them).

In your basic image sensor construction, there’s an array of microlenses sitting above the photosites to direct light into them. Previously, you had gaps between the microlenses, which meant you had light falling through that wasn’t being directed onto the actually light-sensitive parts of the sensor. Canon and Nikon have created gapless microlenses, so more of the light falling onto the sensor is directed into the diode, and not wasted. If you must persist with the bucket metaphor, think of it as putting a larger funnel over the bucket, one that can grab more because it has a wider mouth. Here’s a shot of gapless microlens architecture:

A chief reason to gather as much light as possible is to bring up your signal-to-noise ratio, which is the province of true digital imaging nerds. Anyways, there are several different sources and kinds of noise. Worth knowing is “photon shot” or just “shot” noise, which occurs because the stream of photons hitting the image sensor aren’t perfectly consistent in their timing; there’s “read” noise, which is inherent to image sensors; and “dark current” noise, which is basically stray electrons striking the sensor that aren’t generated by visible light—they’re often caused by heat.

Taken with a Nikon D3s at ISO 102,400
Back in the day, when people shot photographs on this stuff called film, they actually bought it according to its light sensitivity, expressed as an ISO speed. (A standard set by the International Organization for Standardization, confusingly aka ISO. The film speed standard is ISO 5800:1987.) With digital cameras, you also can tell your camera how sensitive to light it should be using ISO, which is supposed to be equivalent to the film standard.

The thing is, whether you’re shooting at ISO 100 or ISO 1600, the same number of photons hit your sensor—you’re just boosting the signal from the sensor, and along with it, all the noise that was picked up on the way. If you’ve got more signal to work with—like in a camera whose sensor has some fat photon-collecting pixels, you get a higher signal-to-noise ratio when you crank it up, which is one reason a photo taken D3 at ISO 6400 looks way better than one from a teeny point-and-shoot, and why a 1D Mark IV or D3s can even think about shooting at an ISO of over 100,000, like the photo above. (Another reason is that a 1D Mark IV-level camera possesses vastly superior image processing, with faster processors that can crunch complex algorithms to help reduce noise.)

Sensor Shake and Bake

There are two kinds of image sensors that most digital cameras use today: CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) sensors, which are actually a kind of active-pixel sensor, but the way they’re made have become a shorthand name. “Fundamentally, at least physics-wise, they work exactly the same,” says Dr. Catrysse, so one’s not intrinsically more awesome than the other. CCD sensors are the more mature imaging technology. So for a long time, they tended to be better, but now CMOS sensors are taking over, having almost completely crowded them out of cellphones and even high-end DSLRs (Leica’s M9 is an exception). Dr. Catrysse suspects CCD sensors will be around for some time, but perhaps more likely in scientific and niche applications where high-level integration, speed and power usage are less of an issue as compared to mainstream mobile applications.

A “CMOS sensor” is one that’s made using the CMOS process, the way you make all kinds of integrated circuits—you know, stuff like CPUs, GPUs and RAM—so they’re actually cheaper to make than CCD sensors. (The cheap-to-make aspect is why they’ve been the sensor of choice in cameraphones, and conversely, DSLRs with huge chips.) And, unlike a CCD sensor, which has to move all of the electrons off of the chip to run them through an analog-to-digital converter, with a CMOS sensor, all of that happens on the same integrated chip. So they’re faster, and they use less power. Something to think about as well: Because they’re made pretty much the same way as any other semiconductor, CMOS sensors progress along with advances in semiconductor manufacturing. Smaller transistors allow for more circuits in a pixel and the potential to remove more noise at the source, says Dr. Catrysse, bringing us closer to fundamental physical limits, like photon noise, and performance that was once the prerogative of CCD sensors. And then we’re talking about using small features in advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology for controlling light at the nanoscale.

The Point

We’ve reached, in many ways, a point of megapixel fatigue: They’re not as valuable, or even as buzzy as they used to be. Not many of us print billboard-sized images. But the technology continues to progress—more refined sensors, smarter image processors, sharper glass—and the camera industry needs something to sell us every year.

But that’s not entirely a bad thing. Our friend and badass war photographer Teru Kuwayama says that while “increasing megapixel counts are mostly just a pain in the ass, unless you happen to be in the hard drive or memory card business, skyrocketing ISOs on the other hand, are a quantum leap, opening up a time-space dimension that didn’t exist for previous generations of photographers. I’d happily trade half the megapixels for twice the light sensitivity.”

Better images, not just bigger images. That’s the promise of this massive shift. The clouds to this silver lining are that by next year, ISO speeds will likely be the headline, easy-to-digest spec for consumers. And like any other spec, just because the ISO ratings go higher doesn’t mean low-light performance will be better. Remember, “more” isn’t more better.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about ISO, isometric exercise or isolation here with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

The pre-PMA announcements are hotting up, and Nikon has just released the details of its 2010 Coolpix lineup. Like most of the manufacturers compact camera ranges, this one offers a veritable confusion of models, so we’ll just hit the highlights here. Don’t worry: there are some genuine goodies here. The Olympus and Fuji ranges, already announced, were so ho-hum we tore up the press releases already.

The first of the two standout models is the P100, a chunky, bridge-style camera which has Nikon’s new back-illuminated CMOS image sensor. This confusingly-named chips aren’t backlit like a computer screen. Instead, the internal wiring is moved behind the actual sensors, and the sensors now sit directly behind the micro-lenses and color filters. This ups the sensitivity significantly (in the range of +6db) and decreases noise. This means better pictures in low-light — now a Nikon hallmark. As a result, the P100 can shoot at up to ISO 3200 with its 10.3MP sensor.

The P100 also has a 26x optical zoom with a respectable ƒ2.8 maximum aperture (shrinking to ƒ5.0 at the outer zoom limit) and shoots 1080p video. It will cost $400 and go on sale in March.

Second is the sleek S8000, a small compact with a huge, 3-inch, 921,000 dot screen. This is the same size and resolution found on Nikon’s high-end DSLRs. The 14.2MP sensor also shoots at ISO 3200 and also records 720p video. The S8000 will cost $300, and be here later this month.

Coolpix P100 [Nikon]

Coolpix S8000 [Nikon]

Keeping with the pre-PMA announcements, Nikon also launched the S and L series of cams just now — the S stands for “Style,” and L stands for “Life.” The Ls are the low-end of the bunch — Life is apparently cheaper than Style — and you’ve got two choices: the $280 L110 superzoom, which has a 15x optical zoom lens in front of a 12.3 megapixel sensor and a 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD, or the $130 L22 compact, which has a 3.6x zoom and a 12 megapixel sensor, and comes in many colors because low-end camera have to come in rainbow colors or the Best Buy people won’t say they’re any good. Nikon says the new $299 S8000 pictured above is the most notable of the Style line, mostly because of its 10x zoom, 720p video, 921,000-dot LCD for previewing. Yeah, not bad at all. After that it’s just incrementally sadder steps down the features scale: the $249 S6000 has a 7x lens and a 230,000-dot LCD, the $200 S4000 adds touchscreen controls to its 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD but has a 12 megapixel sensor and a 4x zoom, and the $149 S3000 has a 2.7-inch LCD, a 4x zoom, and probably isn’t interesting to you at all. Unless it is, in which case you can look at it in the gallery, read the PR after the break, and just generally party the night away.

Continue reading Nikon kicks out new Coolpix S- and L-series cams

Nikon kicks out new Coolpix S- and L-series cams originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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