While combing through our thousands of images from Sony’s a9 launch event last week, we’ve taken a critical look at the camera’s revamped JPEG engine and the effectiveness of its 653-point autofocus system. Read more
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| Earth, photographed from 1.4 billion kilometers / 870 million miles away. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute |
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will soon meet its demise in Saturn’s atmosphere, but one of its last photos of Earth is making for a heck of a swan song. The image, dated April 12, 2017, shows Earth as a bright white dot framed by the planet’s rings. For comparison, it’s about the same size as your standard speck of dust. Our entire planet.
Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 and has spent the last decade and then some beaming back information about the ringed planet and its moons. But all good things must come to an end, and as the spacecraft’s fuel supply runs low, NASA will begin the process of safely putting it out to pasture.
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Ricoh Imaging has released new firmware for its Pentax 645Z medium format camera and K-1 full-format DSLR. The new firmware makes the cameras compatible with the also freshly released version 2.3 of the company’s IMAGE Transmitter 2 software package.
The latter allows the cameras to be controlled when tethered to a PC or Mac via USB cable and after the update now offers a range of new tethered control options, including drive mode, white balance, image format, size and quality, memory card slot selection, live view magnification and focus fine adjustment in live view.
As before, you can also adjust essential settings, such as aperture, shutter-speed, ISO and exposure compensation, or trigger the shutter. Image Transmitter 2 version 2.3 as well as firmware version 1.41 for the K-1 and 1.23 for the 645Z are now available to download on the Ricoh Imaging website.
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According to a report by Reuters Japanese electronics manufacturer Sony has lifted its operating income estimate for the financial year ended March 31. Sony says it now expects an income of around ¥285 billion ($ 2.6 billion), which is up from a 240 billion yen estimate in February.
The main reason for the adjustment of the estimate are lower amortization costs for Sony’s financial services segment but the company also cites lower-than-anticipated costs for its image sensor business. The company doesn’t provide any more detail than that, so we can only speculate what those anticipated costs were.
Sony’s semiconductor business has been a market leader for years with a dominating market share of around 40 percent. Sony sensors have been deployed in the cameras and smartphones of a large number of vendors. The company will report its full-year results on April 28.
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Apps that convert your photos into paintings, with styles ranging from Monet to Lichtenstein, have been all the rage recently, with Prisma being one of the most popular offerings. A research team at UC Berkeley has now developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that can do the reverse – and much more.
Using ‘image style transfer’ their AI can convert Monet’s impressionist paintings into a much more realistic image that comes close to photo quality, giving you a good idea of the scene that the French painter was looking at when he put down his easel and started to paint. In addition, the system is capable of changing winter to summer in an image of a Yosemite scene, turn apples into oranges and horses into zebras. Of course it’s also possible to transform regular photos into Monets, Van Goghs or Cezannes.
The research project uses so-called ‘unpaired data’ which, in the words of the project team means that ‘we have knowledge of the set of Monet paintings and of the set of landscape photographs. We can reason about the stylistic differences between those two sets, and thereby imagine what a scene might look like if we were to translate it from one set into another.’
To achieve that the relationships between similar styles had to be coded in a way that can be understood by a computer and then the AI had to be trained using large number of photos from Flickr and other sources. In a final step the quality of the results was checked by both humans and machines before fine-tuning of the algorithms.
On some occasions the results are still far from perfect but overall the AI is impressively good at transferring styles from one image to another. More information is available on the project’s GitHub page.
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Sony has today announced the development of a 3-layer stacked CMOS image sensor with DRAM for smartphones, making it possible to capture video at 1000 fps. The new chip comes with a DRAM layer in addition to the conventional 2-layer stacked CMOS structure with a back-illuminated layer of photo-sites and a circuit layer for signal processing. The DRAM acts as a temporary buffer for image data that is recorded at very high speeds, before it is put out at normal speed to a conventional image signal processor.
The new design results in very fast readout speeds of 1/120sec for a 19.3 MP image which is approximately 4x faster than conventional chips. Due to the reduction of time it takes to read each line of pixels, the so-called Jello-effect, which occurs when shooting fast-moving subjects on cameras without mechanical shutter, has been greatly reduced.
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The sensor has also been designed to keep noise generated between the circuits on each of the three layers at a minimum. Given the technology is currently still in development stage, there is no way of knowing when it will appear in any production devices. That said, looking at the quite impressive slow-motion footage in the sample video reel below, we sincerely hope it won’t be too long.
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Sony has announced its financial results for Q4 2016 and the numbers show that the Japanese company’s image sensor division has performed well. Within the semiconductors segment, image sensor sales have increased by 40% year-on-year which is largely due to significantly increased sales of image sensors for mobile devices.
Digital camera sales have slightly decreased from 1.8 to 1.6 billion units, resulting in a 9.6% revenue decrease. On the plus side, the company has noted a continued improvement in terms of product mix, with a shift to high value-add models.
Sony upped its forecast for the financial year but the new figures would still mean a 34% fall in sales volume and a 17% fall in sales by value, compared with 2015.
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Things don’t look quite as good in the phone division. The company shipped a total of 5.1 million Xperia phones in the quarter, which is down by around 33% year-on-year. Total mobile revenue for the quarter was ¥249bn ($ 2.2bn). Sony blames lower than expected sales in Europe for the decrease. The forecast for the fiscal year, which ends in March, was also lowered from 17 million to 15 million units.
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You can find all of the details at Sony’s investor relations site.
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According to industry publication DigiTimes, we should expect demand for CMOS image sensors, particularly high-end units, to increase in the short and medium term. This is mainly due to the increased popularity of dual-camera modules in high-end smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone 7 Plus, LG G5 or Huawei P9, and growing demand for imaging applications in the automotive and security industries.
Approximately 70% of all available sensors currently go into mobile devices which remains the largest application. With dual-cameras slowly but surely becoming standard even on lower-end devices the demand from this sector is expected to grow further.
Demand from those sectors is putting more pressure on already tight CMOS sensor supplies. Of course, that is good news for those camera manufacturers that are also in the sensor business and increased demand should mean more research and development and therefore better products in the long run.
(Photo: ‘Image Sensor’ by Bengt Nyman / Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC license)
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Google first showed off its RAISR technology, which uses machine learning to produce high-quality versions of low-resolution images, in November last year. Now the company has published a blog post to announce that RAISR has been implemented into Google+ for Android. Google+ is used by many photographers to display high-resolution images and the move is aimed at reducing mobile data requirements, which could be particularly useful in areas with slow connections or when using data is expensive, for example when roaming.
RAISR allows for viewing images at their (almost) full glory while reducing bandwidth requirements per image by up to 75%. Google has only just begun to apply the technology to high-resolution images in the Google+ streams of a subset of Android devices but is already processing 1 billion images per week, resulting in a total bandwidth reduction of about a third for the affected users. Google says it is planning to roll out RAISR more broadly in the coming weeks, so your data consumption might go down soon if you use Google+ frequently.
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The Mate 9 is Huawei latest flagship smartphone and comes with a Leica-powered dual-camera that combines a 20MP monochrome sensor with a 12MP RGB chip. Image data from both sensors is combined for optimized image quality.
The test engineers at DxOMark have now put the new technology through its paces and with a score of 85 the Mate 9 performs respectably but cannot take one of the top spots. It slots in at a joint 12th position, just behind the LG G5 and iPhone 7. It shares this spot with the LG V20, which was also recently added to DxO’s mobile rankings.
In still image mode the testers liked the good detail preservation, accurate white balance and good exposure of the device but deducted points for inconsistent color in cloudy conditions, color casts with flash use and some ghosting artifacts. Video footage also showed good detail and exposure and was well-stabilized. On the downside, there is a noticeable jello effect when recording while walking and visible noise and reduced detail in low light. You can read the full report on DxOMark.com.
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