by: John Young
Bob pushed the shutter release button and.NOTHING HAPPENED. The football
passed into his son's hands and the actual photo he took was one of a
cheerleader's pom-pom. Bob missed the touchdown too. He resisted an insane
urge to slam the camera to the ground and jump on it.
This was his first digital camera, and Bob had just experienced an
unpleasant surprise. He had used film cameras all his life, but when his
Yashica went into the shop a friend loaned him a digital camera. He
naively decided to take some action shots and discovered the most
maddening "feature" of digital cameras . the shutter delay.
MADDENING AND FRUSTRATING
Articles on this subject have attributed shutter delay to:
1. The camera's focus system
2. The time it takes the camera to digitally process the image
3. Reaction time of the photographer
Numbers one and three are lag times that most people using digital cameras
are accustomed to. Most have used a film camera and know it needs a few
milliseconds to focus.
The no-brainer solution is to reduce the aperture of the lens to increase
depth of field, or aim the camera at the object you wish to be in focus
and depress the shutter button half way in order to "tell" the camera what
to focus on, then move the camera to center the image and depress it the
rest of the way.
As far as human reaction time, well, it hasn't really changed much for
users of film cameras, and people experienced in taking action shots
usually get what they want.
So let's look at number 2, the time it takes to process the picture.
TIME TO DO THE PROCESSING
Processing the picture (so the camera can be ready for the next one) comes
in several steps to move it from the image sensor to flash card storage:
1. Color corrections. The camera has to examine each and every Charge
Couple Device (CCD) element on the photo sensor. It adds green, blue, and
red to achieve the right color balance. For a 3 mega pixel camera, the
processor has to make 9 million calculations.
2. Sharpening. This boosts the contrast by detecting and sharpening edges.
3. Compression. This process converts the 12 to 14 bits of each CCD sensor
to 16 bits by "padding" the information and compressing it to 8 bits. This
compresses the file size to 9 megabytes.
These steps require a tremendous amount of computational time. No wonder
Bob missed his shot!
CATCHING THE ACTION
There are two ways of capturing action:
1. The "consecutive mode". If the camera has this mode, you can take a
series of rapid shots moving through the event. This requires a camera
with a large .buffer" to hold photos for processing.
2. Anticipating shots by depressing and holding down the shutter release
prior to the event. This requires an ability to predict the future,
something most of us don't possess.
THE FUTURE OF FASTER SHOOTING
Obviously this would all be simplified if micro processing were faster.
Even with large buffers, the speed in which data is transmitted to the
processor is prohibited by the rate at which data is conveyed from the
CCD. Micro processing speed is the next bottleneck.
Faster clock rates and data transfer speeds would reduce or even eliminate
"shutter lag" time. There are several technologies in the wings that offer
hope:
1. Nanotube and nanowire technologies. These are both the offspring of
"nanotechnology", the ability to make tiny machines at the "nano" level, a
billionth of a meter in size rather than a millionth of a meter
(micrometer) and offer hope for a 500 GHz clock rate or more.
2. DNA Yes, you heard me right. Computing based on DNA strands in which
information is stored and processed.
3. Other materials
. Gallium Arsenide with much a faster speed has been used for years for
military purposes.
. Silicon-Germanium chips increase the transfer of light signals to
silicon. These traditionally have worked best at ultra cold temperatures,
but many computer simulations have shown that they may be made to approach
1000 GHz (1 THz) at room temperature.
. Indium-antimonide. Much faster than silicon
.Optical transistors. A glass material known as chalcogenide becomes a
switch as its refracting properties are changed. No need to translate
those photons into anything else.
. Coated Viruses. The latest research involves coating viruses with a
conducting material. Much higher speeds at the molecular level can be
obtained. This will give a new meaning to the term "computer virus".
4. Parallel Processing As we've noticed lately with the war between Intel
and AMD over the number of parallel processors crammed into a CPU, digital
camera processing would benefit from parallel processors handling the
focussing, sharpening and squeezing.
In addition, improvement in instructional efficiency by reducing the lines
of code would make the whole process more efficient.
HOLD ON AND WAIT FOR THE FUTURE
The REAL solution to this maddening shutter delay appears to be in the
material the processor is constructed of, as well as advancements in the
software.
But we've got awhile to wait for it. Although a few alternate materials
have been around for awhile, everything else is still in the research and
development phase. Even when it finally trickles out of the labs, it will
probably make your future digital camera cost around $10000 - $15000.
Quite a price tag for the ability to take pictures as fast as a film
camera! Still.
Except for the lag, the digital camera has it all over film cameras, once
the photo is captured by the memory card. The new technology will be worth
the wait.
Digital camera owners are known for their ability to wait.as they
desperately punch the shutter release trying to grab the fleeting smile of
their new baby, or the football that lands in his hands eighteen years
later, when he scores the winning touchdown.
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