Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 01:12 PM 9/1/2003 -0700, Feli di Giorgio wrote: >Ok, so Leica has to design lenses with with a collimator lens at the rear. >Would that have a negative impact on image quality? The entire lens formula has to be done over. A simple collimator won't work. I was using the term collimator as a mental visual as to what has to happen to the image in order to give a clean sensor image. I doubt seriously that even Leica would (could) cough up the scratch to do a complete re-design on a stable of digital lenses. > I pitched the Foveon, because I found the images that I have seen from > the SD9 to be very pleasing. They are sharper and don't exhibit a lot of > the artifacts that I see in images from lets say a 10D. > >feli Visual image quality is a result of firmware/software fix-ups both in the camera and in the host computer. This is true for all digital cameras. What you see in a digital camera photograph is 25% hardware technology (there are only a few suppliers of sensors and sensor image processing chips) and 75% software, which works on the pixels after they are captured. It's all an illusion. The un-ailesing and un-colorfringing is simply an educated stab at moving pixels based upon algorithms which were written from previous work in studying what happens to the original image when picket fences disappear, lines get jaggy, rainbows appear around the image periphery, etc... The raw RGGB data read out of the sensor, if simply put together into an image, without any fix-ups and interpolation, would be a sorry excuse for a photograph. Yuck! Interpolation is a good term to describe digital photography's end result. Look up the dictionary definition of interpolation. http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary It matters little which camera/lens you use other than one manufacturer's software does a better job of fixing-up the final image than another's. Cleaner whites, more saturated colors, more noise removed, sharper looking, etc. It's whichever one you like. That's the one to get. JB - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html