Flynano, the sub-70 kg carbon fiber seaplane designed to go around regulations by sheer lack of mass. Their first prototype that was retired and is now exhibited at verkkokauppa in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki, Finland. I took a few photos, more after the break.
This should be highschool level deduction.
In short:
Assuming equivalent sensor technology where read noise or thermal noise doesn’t dominate:
1. Low light performance (low noise in low light photos) is dependent on absolute aperture size
2. Dynamic range (avoiding saturation in bright areas while still lighting dark areas) is dependent on pixel size
In slightly more length:
1. You catch more photons from the same target with a bigger aperture. With more photons, there is less randomness.
2. A small pixel saturates with less photons than a large one. If you have low dynamic range, you either blow highlights or lower the exposure so that highlights are not blown, but then you get more noise in the shadows.
A larger sensor by itself does NOT improve low light capability. The lens with a certain aperture diameter (mm) can only catch so many photons*
You have to enlarge the optics to get a good low light performance, not the sensor. You can keep a smaller sensor and just enlarge the optics to reach the same result as with big optics and big sensor.
Let’s see what cameras are sold with:
A. Zoom factor. More of this usually includes the lens design tradeoff of making the aperture much smaller so it hurts low light performance.
B. Megapixels. More of them means the pixels are smaller and that lowers dynamic range.
As a result we get cameras that have blown highlights and/or noisy dark areas outdoors (too small pixels) at best, and completely noisy images everywhere when used inside (too small aperture).
The fix would be:
1. Enlargen the aperture. So throw away the zoom lenses and go with well designed primes. Immediate improvement in low light performance.
2. Lessen the amount of megapixels. People have to resize down for web anyway. 2 megapixels could be good. 1000×2000 is bigger than almost any web graphics. One could go down to half a megapixel, 500×1000.
The results could be phenomenal. The photos could be indistinguishable from full frame DSLR photos at the same half megapixel resolution and modest focal lengths! Except maybe for background defocus. Even a 0.7 megapixel image won’t fit here, you have to click it:
A 0.7 megapixel image by Jean-Marie Huet. WordPress isn’t very good with images I’m afraid so you have to click the image. It’s shot with a 5 D mark II.
Changed the title picture again. Air happened to be in such a configuration that the smoke from the hood district heating plant travelled horizontally. It uses fuel oil and isn’t in use most days. Only when it’s quite cold like today (about -10 C).
Making coal electricity and using the waste heat for district heating apartment buildings is quite effective and has a pretty low workload compared to separate houses and oil heaters or what you have.
There isn’t any really good “green” solution for this. Making district heat with wood has its problems for example, and having heat pumps everywhere is inefficient and even inelegant in many senses. First making electricity with a low efficiency and then using that to make heat again with a low multiplier. You need magnets and bearings and whatnot in both devices. Are there even enough rare earths?
Building nuclear plants close to cities isn’t nice either. If you built them far away, you’d need to build really long pipes and that gets inefficient again. It also hurts the nuke’s electricity output surprisingly much. You could probably optimize the plant for better district heat production though, and the Russians have done that in some cold cities. But you can’t have a single nuclear plant as the only thing that’s heating a city: it would be devastating if an unplanned break left a million people cold in their homes.
In the future though, buildings can be much more energy efficient, so that’s the biggest saver. That too can be overdone, and I don’t like many modern buildings which have tiny awkwardly placed windows. A human produces about 70 watts of heat, and electronic equipment produces some waste heat too. “Zero energy” houses can take the heat from the exiting air and use it to heat the incoming air (like penguins do with the blood in their feet), making large savings (and at the same time making it hard to retrofit some old buildings.)
Dividing Finland’s yearly energy consumption with all the seconds in the year and all the people, we get nine kilowatts of constant power, day and night, summer and winter, for each person. That’s huge.
One big part of that is heating. It’s also a big missing part of the discussion.
even though it’s Finland. No snow so far.
Been riding the bike to work almost every day.
Also noticed that the blog had been hidden from search engines with some option. That should be cleared now.
Quantum levitation of a superconductiong coil (I assume it’s a coil) on something “locks” it, doesn’t just push it like a magnet. And it looks very very strange. It looks so fake.
The previous post got old immediately. Sony released a couple of cameras (NEX-5N and NEX-3C) and lenses and Panasonic released a small lens and leaked two high grade ones.
What beats me is how the Sony 16-55 mm F2.8 can only cost 600 dollars. The aperture has to be physically big. The 30% smaller M43 sensor in the Panasonics and Olympuses should result in smaller lenses for equal fields of view and F-numbers, meaning less material cost, less surface area to polish and inspect etc.
So far, M43 has enjoyed an advantage over Sony because of a greater lens selection, especially in the pancakes section. Panasonic continues to build on that with the interesting 14-42 pancake-storable powerzoom. But Sony’s new sensors seem to be frighteningly good. I don’t know about dynamic range, but at least high ISO performance has seemed very good in tests.
The Panny high grade lenses 12-35 and 35-100 of yet unknown f number (but rumored to be bright) are big and don’t give so much advantage compared to NEX in that regard. If you couple that with an old Panasonic 12 megapixel sensor, it’s possible you’re not that much smaller than a NEX.
You could get around that by using pancake primes. You could also improve the sensor and or processing somewhat. Could Fuji join M43 and bring some kickass sensors? (Are they even bleeding edge anymore? The Sony A77 is rumored to be better than the 5D Mk II in low light) Everybody’s been waiting for that to happen for years…
A very incomplete relatively bright sub 1000 euro SLR and Mirrorless lens survey. I didn’t include Sony Alpha or NEX or Samsung NX or Pentax or Four Thirds since I’m tired. Took the prices from topshot.fi.
I was assuming Canon and Nikon would get very cheap lenses since their volumes are gargantuan. But once you look beyond the cheap Canikon 50 mm lenses*, it’s not so bad for Micro Four Thirds owners as I thought. Since I own the 20 mm already, the 14 mm (I hear it’s good and it’s really small too which is a plus) and the 45 mm might be good choices. Or maybe some day someone (Sigma or Tamron?) will bring a bright zoom there. If it’s going to be Olympus or Panasonic, it’ll probably be very expensive.
Also if someone’s going to bring a bright f/1.4 or f/1.8 around 35ish mm pancake for really cheap (say 150-200 euros), it might sell very well. I don’t know if the camera firmware has to support distortion and cromatic aberration correction for exactly every particular lens for any of that to be done or if there is a capability in the camera and the lens just has to give a few parameters. The latter would mean it would be easy to sell simple third party designs which could have digital corrections. Otherwise, the camera manufacturers might make it difficult since the lens would compete with their designs and they could keep the gates by giving their own lenses better firmware correction.
*: why is this focal length so popular? Is everyone taking portraits? It’s very narrow once you consider the 1.5 crop factor. Comparing to the “classic” 50 mm with 35 mm film, the APS 50 mm would be the equivalent of 75 mm with 35 mm film. Most fixed lens film rangefinders were equipped with 40 mm lenses.
Canon
Only Primes because bright zooms are so expensive
EF 20 mm f/2.8 USM 529 €
EF 24 mm f/2.8 479 €
EF 35 mm f/2 289 €
EF 50 mm f/1.8 II 129 €
EF 85 mm f/1.8 USM 449 €
EF 100 mm f/2.0 USM 489 €
Sigma
Primes
10 mm F2.8 EX DC Fisheye HSM 679 €
30mm F1.4 EX DC HSM 459 €
50 mm F2.8 EX DG Macro 319 €
70mm F2.8 EX DG Macro 499 €
105 mm F2.8 EX DG Macro 469 €
150 mm F2.8 APO EX DG OS HSM Macro 999 €
Zooms
17-70 mm f/2.8-4 DC Macro OS HSM 449 €
70-200 mm F2.8 APO II DG EX Macro HSM 799 €
Tamron
Primes
SP AF 60 mm f/2,0 Di II LD Macro /Ca 459 €
AF 90 mm F/2.8 SP Di Macro /Ca 499€
Zooms
SP AF 17-50mm F/2.8 Di II XR /Ca 399 €
AF 28-75 mm F/2.8 SP XR Di 399 €
SP AF 17-50 mm F/2,8 XR Di II VC LD 449 €
SP AF 70-200mm F/2.8 Di LD (IF) /Ca 749 €
Nikon
Only primes
Nikkor AF-S 35 mm DX f/1,8G 209 €
Nikkor AF-S DX 40 mm f/2.8G Micro 279.00 €
Nikkor AF 50 mm f/1.8D 169 €
Nikkor AF-S 50 mm f/1.8G 219.00 €
Nikkor AF-S 50 mm f/1.4G 399.00 €
Nikkor AF-S 60 mm f/2.8G ED Micro 549 €
Sigma, Tamron
pretty much the same as with Canon
Only primes because no bright zooms exist
Olympus
M.Zuiko Di 12 mm F2.0 799.00 €
M.Zuiko Di 17 mm 1:2.8 pancake 329.00 € (is this bright enough to get on the list?)
M.Zuiko Di 45 mm F1.8 299.00 €
Panasonic
Panasonic G 14 mm F2.5 ASPH pancake 399.00 €
Panasonic G 20 mm F1.7 ASPH pancake 399.0 €
Leica DG Summilux 25 mm F1.4 ASPH 649.00 €
Voigtländer
Nokton 25 mm F0.95 roughly 1000 €