Shooting Pictures in Pitch Black Darkness … with No Flash!
Here is something from the wonderful technology wonderland of the Rising Sun. Here is an excerpt from Akihabara News.
I can assure you that you read the title correctly. Olympus offers today an 8Mpix camera supporting up to ISO 10000 to shoot pictures in pitch dark. But, switching to ISO 10000 will bring the camera down from 8 to 3Mpix. Otherwise, the camera has a rather compact size (94×56.5×22.3mm) and a total weight of 115g. It has 20MB of internal memory and takes videos at 30fps.
Yup. That is ISO 10000. This gives photographers the ability to take pictures in pitch darkness. Now this is a cool toy. For now, only in Japan.
January 25th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
i just realized that this camera is a point-and-shoot type for the average japanese user. does this mean that the average japanese user is interested in camera specifications like ISO values? interesting … the average user i believe typically only looks at resolution (megapixels).
January 29th, 2007 at 9:45 am
That’s not too nifty.
To get ISO 10000 or almost two stops above ISO 3200, on a traditional tiny 1/1.8″ sensor means lots of sensor gain. Which means lots of sensor noise. As in REALLY lots of sensor noise.
And “pitch black” is not quite, too. In a curtained daytime room, with a 50mm lens at f1.8, ISO 1600 requires 1/25 second. So ISO 12800 would require 1/150 second. That’s a CURTAINED DAYTIME ROOM.
To wit, ISO 10000 will give really horrific image quality (the DSLR’s which have huge sensors with high quantum efficiency, only go to ISO 1600 or 3200, and their sensors are about TEN times the areal size of this camera’s). And it won’t work in total darkness.
Sony’s Super Nightshot is a better approach: illuminate the scene with infrared diodes, which camera sensors are very sensitive to, but infrared light is invisible to humans.
But you won’t be invisible to that sniper with an infrared scope. Zing!
January 29th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I must add to my “curtained daytime room” analogy. My experience is only at ISO 1600 with the Canon 350D. In typical nighttime situations, ISO 1600 with the 50mm f1.8 which is a very fast lens, gives about 1/2 second to 2 seconds exposure time.
ISO 12800 is 3 stops away. So that would give 1/16 second at best. 1/16 second exposure time is still not short enough to avoid blurring effects.
January 29th, 2007 at 9:48 am
… so you get lots of blurring and a craptacular noisy grainy image…
hmm.. i think i’ll pass.
January 29th, 2007 at 10:15 am
thanks for the camera tidbits learned a lot in three (3) blog comments
or maybe they have created some nice nifty technology to improve reduce the exposure time to an acceptable level? why should they settle for something that is extremely grainy?
January 30th, 2007 at 3:17 am
one can reduce the sensor gain noise, but at the expense of loosing detail, by using a median filter.
there is no substitute for large sensor photosites when you need high light sensitivity: a large “bucket” captures more photos. which is why ISO10000 on such a tiny sensor is so iffy.
so what you get is not much color range, a lower resolution image to boot, and blurred out details. but at least you get a photo.
it really is a gimmick feature, more than anything else.
January 30th, 2007 at 3:44 am
nifty!