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Sony Ericsson has some new phones out, including the K800, which has a 3.2 megapixel camera, and this "completely new feature":
A completely new feature developed by Sony Ericsson is BestPic™, which ensures that you never ‘miss’ an important picture. Press the shutter button once and get 9 full quality 3.2 megapixel pictures to choose from in a time sequence – 4 pictures before and 4 pictures after the actual image you captured."
I've been trying to wrap my head around what that might mean, but the only conclusion I can reach is that this phone can tell the future, and knows when you are about to press the shutter. This is indeed a feature I have not seen on any other phone.
It either means the camera is consistently maintaining a shared memory cache of about 30 mb (and is always taking photos and keeping the most recent 9 in memory ), or it means that it's got a tachyon trigger.
Posted by: Sterling on March 1, 2006 07:49 PMActually, Sterling, that might not be quite as impossible as it sounds. After all, that 30MB memory cache only needs to be activated when the phone is in camera mode.
Posted by: Felix on March 2, 2006 06:16 AMGood point.
And I didn't mean to make it sound impossible. I assume there's some kind of multithreading involved and a shared memory object, because that's how it could be done for a web application on a Unix machine (which is the only real development environment I've done much work in, but I know handhelds are often very different and I could have this totally wrong). That said, in a Unix environment one way to do it would be to have one process that gets the images every n/10th of a second, and then probably a second process that removes the oldest of 10 images every n/10th of a second. There'd probably also be a third process creating thumbnails from the images and doing other presentation tasks, because that requires access to an image toolkit/library such as GD.
A team I was on actually did something like this back in 1996 to develop what I think was the first "nonce" button on the web. I was the (third party) project manager on the trading and portfolio accounting interface for American Express Financial Services' first web broker offering, and the firm insisted in its specs and on follow-up that no customer should be able to double-click a trade submit button. At the time people had a tendency to double-click web buttons and links from force of habit with Windows, which is a problem in a live trading environment, because a duplicate trade might be submitted.
Javascript was still kind of edgy at that point, and I don't think it was supported by some proprietary browsers, like AOL's, so we had to find a server-side way of making a button become inert after one click. We spent about a week trying to figure it out, without success, when we finally decided to do it by keeping a running tally of the all the "submits" in the trailing 2 seconds, and ignoring those that came from the same IP address. So it wasn't the same as making the button inert, but it had the same practical effect and American Express agreed to it.
It was pretty cool.
Posted by: Sterling on March 2, 2006 04:35 PMFascinating. Sterling is not only an semi-professional homicide detective, a terrorism expert with a special knowledge of Al Quaida, regularly consults for the Chinese government on their internet domain policy and now is apparently a software engineer and an early pioneer in commecial internet applications. Words fail.
You are all wrong. The SE camera shutter button needs to be held down for a certain amount of time to take a photo. YOu will know that you have activated the camera when it makes a simulated, polyphonic click noise and otherwise impersonates a non-digital camera. It must be thus, else you might find yourself taking a lot of photos of the inside of your pocket, which is less interesting than listening to the latest iteration of Sterling's delusional fantasies. Anyway, during the period, about a second, when the button has to be held down, the camera is taking images anyhow (as it is at all times when camera mode is on), and merely keeps 4 frames from the latest slug of otherwise disposable memory. There is no trick to keeping 4 frames after the "shutter" has been clicked.
You do not need to thanks me, your silent admiration is all I ask for.
Posted by: eurof on March 2, 2006 08:50 PMIs this really a conversation on if it possible? It's just auto bracketing without stepping up and down the aperture. Someone wizards in Sony marketing came up with the space time continuum explanation that most every one in the world understands in practical terms, and then it was less loose on the a roomfull of uptight pedants. Voila.
Posted by: 99 on March 2, 2006 09:51 PMEurof: Fascinating. Sterling is not only an semi-professional homicide detective, a terrorism expert with a special knowledge of Al Quaida, regularly consults for the Chinese government on their internet domain policy and now is apparently a software engineer and an early pioneer in commecial internet applications. Words fail.
I thought you already knew about my role as a pioneer in online financial services? It's reasonably well-documented.
Eurof: It must be thus, else you might find yourself taking a lot of photos of the inside of your pocket, which is less interesting than listening to the latest iteration of Sterling's delusional fantasies.
Um, yeah. See, what Stefan, Felix and I are marveling about is that the camera actually saves several photos that are taken before the person clicks the button. As for your notion that memory is "disposable", it's not. Memory works in a certain way. 3.2 megapixel images will constitute non-trivial amounts of data for a current mobile phone to manipulate quickly and store on the fly. For one to manage at least 9 such images simultaneously without committing them to a memory peripheral (i.e. Compact Flash) is a neat trick. Thus our discussion.
99: Is this really a conversation on if it possible?
We know it's possible and the "tachyon trigger" remark was a joke.
99: It's just auto bracketing without stepping up and down the aperture.
See, now that's past the limits of my technical competence. File and memory manipulation, as well as TCP/IP and underlying internet technologies I understand pretty well because I had to learn them as part of my job, which is strictly focused on retail financial services and doesn't involve managing money for Saudi princes and opium lords [ahem]. But once you get into talking about apertures and f-stops and stuff, I'm lost. My photography skillset is purely of the point and click variety.
Posted by: Sterling on March 2, 2006 10:34 PMIt's pretty simple. Don't let photo geeks beat you up. Shutter Speed controls how fast the shutter is open. Apeture is how big the opening is. With low light, you want a longer exposure (more light hitting the film). But if your subject is moving, you can't lengthen you shutter time, so you make opening larger (more light comes in). There's a little more to it than that (depth of field and focus come into play), but it's a good outline.
The typical preference is to ajust aperture (for cameras with built in light meters, you have aperture priority, meaning you set the shutter speed, and the meter tells you your aperture); what this is is beyond my skills.
So, for quite some time now, there has been 'auto bracketing' which is a feature used by photojournalists, or anyone who doesn't have the time to think about or measure light levels (and, of course, amateurs), which takes a photo the aperture setting selected, and then additional frames (stepping up and down, meaning makeing the aperture slightly larger or smaller). The adjustments were number of frames bracketing and increments in aperture (half stop, whole stop). For, action photos, this is useful, since you aren't fussing with the camera, and you can set the shutter speed a little faster that might be prudent, in hopes of getting both a very sharp image, and one that isn't underexposed (which is what happens when an insufficient amount of light enters).
The Sony is simply bracketing the photo, and likely considering both shutter speed (which is aritificial in point and shoot digital cameras, as Eurof pointed out) and aperture, in hopes of getting an in focus and well lit photo of a drunken hipster at Misshapes.
Posted by: 99 on March 2, 2006 11:14 PMAh, OK. So it focus, zooms and adjusts the frame as needed and then keeps that setting across repeated exposures?
Well, that makes it even more complicated. I had just been thinking about the processing and storage issues.
Posted by: Sterling on March 2, 2006 11:51 PMTHERE IS NO SHUTTER. It is a digital camera. The "shutter" is open all the time. Activate camera mode and the screen has a moving picture on it which is translated by digital computation in the phone itself. It consists of recording "freeze frames" one after the other, maybe 10-20 times a second. The camera is doing this all the time.
" what Stefan, Felix and I are marveling about is that the camera actually saves several photos that are taken before the person clicks the button."
I have a Sony Ericsson phone. There is a sufficient pause in the period from pressing the button to the picture is "taken" to take loads of photos. This might be different, but it does not have to be. Cease marvelling.
Press the button to take a picture. The phone thinks, OK, button pressed if he holds it down long enough I will make that stupid shutter noise to make the human happy and set my photo display subroutine in motion. In the meantime I will start recording the 4 or so frames before I am meant to make the click, and store them, compressed, in my flash memory, of which I am equipped with vast amounts.
Button is pressed long enough -- phone says, OK, "click" (you idiot). Thinks Ok, in display subroutine also store the 4 frames AFTER I made the click noise.
Posted by: eurof on March 3, 2006 06:19 AMThe 'shutter', if, for the purposes of this conversation, means the active recording of an image on the CCD, is not always on. It is only active for the approximate time that correlates to the 'speed' set either by the user, or, likely in this case, an average by the manufacturer. You seem to imply that a digital camera freezes an image that is continuously recorded. This is not the case. The image displayed on the LCD on the camera is a low res approximation of what will be captured by the CCD when the 'shutter release' is pressed. You might notice that the image in the LCD is both darker and less sharp than the resultant image.
The pause is not typically indicative of an ability to take multiple photos, but rather a limitation of the software. A digital SLR, such a D70, has a much better shutter (and in this case, it is a true shutter) reponse, pretty much the same as a film camera. The lag you refer to is already pushing the limits of the technical abilities of the camera. If the new Sony can compose and record four additional and distinct images in this time, it represents a pretty impressive advance. The amount of flash memory is immaterial. Go get a regular digital camera. Put a 256MB card in it, or a 1GB card, and the 'shutter' response, or lag as you refer to it, is constant, and cannot be improved regardless of the adjustments you make to the software-based version of shutter speed.
Note that my discussion for Sterling was about a mechanical based film camera, and the concept of bracketing a photo has been around for years. Excepting Stefan's marvelling at the bad language, there is nothing interesting here to someone familar to traditional photography, just another instance of going, hmmm, so we've spent how many billions of dollars of R&D, and we are almost at the point where digital cameras are as good as extant technology?
Lastly, if you visit a site such as DP Review, you will find the nomeclature of 'shutter reponse' to be acceptable usage among professionals (or, at least, that noxious term 'prosumer') as a way of described the lag you refer to. No one seems to mind that in many instances there isn't, in fact, a shutter. But we all appreciate the extraordinarily pendantic distinction you make, enriching my previous observation at the ridiculousness of this conversation.
Posted by: 99 on March 3, 2006 08:39 AMThe one thing I left out was that write to media time is also a consideration, which directly contravenes your claim that flash memory is always active vis a vis the lens. Given the power levels we are dealing, I find the notion that camera phones are continuous writing to media and that the faux shutter click then does what, writes a second file that is then named and recalled distinct from a continuously maintained cache (that is in and of itself written and overwritten), highly specious.
Posted by: 99 on March 3, 2006 08:44 AMI have a Sony Ericsson phone.
Congratulations. So do I - a T610, which I think was marketed in Yurp under the same name. It takes pictures for shit. (Nice Bluetooth implementation, though.)
If you will take a moment to check your Sony Ericsson phone you will see that the quality of the moving video during the "point and shoot" portion of the picture-taking experience, prior to the "digital computation in the phone itself" phase, is inferior to an actual rendered still image taken by the camera. (Which is saying something.)
That's because the camera lacks the "digital computation" resources to process sequential frames of its top-resolution image. This new camera probably also lacks that capability, but it comes much closer. It is able to handle (probably) ten frames of 3.2 megapixel video.
After wiggle my hand in front of it a few times, fast, then slow, then fast again and then slow again to test its "digital computation" power, I'd guess T610 only handles about 8 or so frames per second, total. And they are, as mentioned above, for shit.
THERE IS NO SHUTTER. It is a digital camera. The "shutter" is open all the time.
Yeah, well, you see where it says "Preview" and "Post" on your computer monitor, down below this message? Those aren't really buttons. And you aren't really pressing them or clicking them, you're just engaging in a pantomime of semiotics.
Posted by: Sterling on March 3, 2006 08:45 AMAnd if you don't believe me, you can try this:
Summary
It takes several steps for a digital camera to take a picture. Here's a review of what happens in a CCD camera, from beginning to end:
* You aim the camera at the subject and adjust the optical zoom to get closer or farther away.
* You press lightly on the shutter release.
* The camera automatically focuses on the subject and takes a reading of the available light.
* The camera sets the aperture and shutter speed for optimal exposure.
* You press the shutter release all the way.
* The camera resets the CCD and exposes it to the light, building up an electrical charge, until the shutter closes.
* The ADC measures the charge and creates a digital signal that represents the values of the charge at each pixel.
* A processor interpolates the data from the different pixels to create natural color. On many cameras, it is possible to see the output on the LCD at this stage.
* A processor may perform a preset level of compression on the data.
* The information is stored in some form of memory device (probably a Flash memory card).
Posted by: 99 on March 3, 2006 08:49 AMGood to see 99 enthusing for a change. I am all for digital cameras, with or without shutters. I like the old type too though.
Posted by: Claude de Bigny on March 3, 2006 01:39 PM