Think of it as digital photography 2.0.
In the last decade, photography has been transformed by one revolution, the near-total replacement of analog film cameras by digital image sensors. Now researchers and companies are starting to stretch their wings by taking advantage of what a computer can do with sensor data either within the camera or on a full-fledged PC.
Some elements of this new era, which researchers often call computational photography, are refinements of existing technology. For example, some cameras can wait to take the photo only when subjects are smiling and not blinking, in effect placing the shutter release button in the hands of the subjects rather than the photographer.
But more dramatic changes could shift the definition of a camera more dramatically. One major area of research, for example, uses computational processing to create a 3D representation of a scene rather than just the two dimensions of traditional photography.
"There's a shift in thinking going on," said Kevin Connor, who manages professional digital imaging products for Adobe Systems. "People are starting to see the broader possibilities and where we can push things...People are realizing that maybe we shouldn't just be trying to make the best traditional photography experience."
What changes will the new era bring? It's hard to say for sure, but if history is anything to judge by, it'll be a rough but fun ride. On the unpleasant side, I expect market disruption, accelerated product obsolescence, and customer confusion. But I also anticipate genuinely exciting technology that could open up new creative and practical possibilities.
Digital photography 1.0 already has meant hard times for the photography industry. The film business expired almost completely overnight; Polaroid closing its film plants this year is only the most recent example, and Konica Minolta, a venerable camera maker, sold its camera assets to electronics giant and image sensor manufacturer Sony. People can share photos online rather than mailing prints. And camera makers no longer have years to recoup research and design investments in a particular model: although SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras hold their value reasonably well, compact cameras have a shelf life not much longer than a banana.
Early phases
Depending on your definitions, you can argue the computational photography revolution already has begun.
For example, editing software can correct camera lens flaws such as barrel and pincushion distortion, which makes parallel lines bow outward and inward, respectively, or chromatic aberration, which causes colored fringes along high-contrast edges. But that's generally a largely manual process.
At the 6sight conference in Monterey, Calif., last year Adobe's Connor showed computational photography techniques that lets a photo's depth of field be expanded or changed, or the photographer's vantage point be shifted. You can see Connor give a demo of that in the video at right.
More sophisticated possibilities are emerging. Hasselblad's high-end cameras come with software that can perform what it calls Digital Auto Correction, which fixes chromatic aberration and various other problems based specifically on the setting of the lens when the photo was taken.
Because it's a tough computational problem, though, and there's only so much horsepower in the camera, Hasselblad relies on post-processing in software to perform some of the fixes. In essence, the computer has become an extension of the act of pushing the shutter-release button.
Another early area for computational photography involves using a computer to combine multiple photos into one composite shot of the same scene.
Two well-established examples are panoramas and high-dynamic range (HDR) photography. With panoramas, computers can stitch multiple photos together to create a much larger view of a scene than a camera could take on its own. Taken to its extreme, work such as Carnegie Mellon's GigaPan project can produce images gigantic enough to get lost in, at least figuratively.
HDR is more complicated. With it, photographers take multiple pictures of the same scene at different exposure levels then use particular software to produce a composite image that doesn't suffer the common problems of blown-out bright areas and murky shadows. With HDR, photographers can create an image that shows both a cathedral's brilliant stained-glass window and its subdued stonework.
HDR is a painstaking process today. But that might not always be the case. Panasonic is working on an image sensor that takes three separate images of the same scene for better dynamic range. And it's certainly possible that a camera itself could take several images, align them, and create its own HDR image.
A more radical example is merging multiple images to take the best of each. For example, the high-end version of Adobe's Photoshop CS3 can convert multiple pictures of a tourist attraction, each picture cluttered by visitors, into a single scene with the ephemeral humans gone. In one sense, it's fiction, because the moment never happened, but seen another way, it's capturing some of the essence of a scene.
Another way multiple images can be combined is by using MotionDSP, whose software can be used to help intelligence agencies and movie-phone videographers get more out of their imagery. The technology relies on the fact that multiple frames of a video captured the same subject matter, and processing that can produce an image of higher fidelity than what any individual frame possesses.
MotionDSP CEO Sean Varah said it could be possible for a camera to take a burst of five or six images, then computationally combine them into a single, higher-resolution shot. "I think camera guys would love to have that in the camera because they're always trying to sell you a better camera or keep the price point up," Varah said.
Software that can sharpen edges in digital photos has been around for years, but more sophisticated processing is possible, too. MIT researcher Rob Fergus has been working on software to deblur photos marred by camera shake, analyze photos to infer exactly how your camera jiggled when you took it, then back out those changes.
Go deep
It's the 3D realm where some of the more dramatic changes appear. Stereo photography, otherwise known as stereoscopy, has been around since the Victorian age, but that technique relied on taking two images of a scene and letting the human brain reconstruct a 3D image.
Research under way now could let the camera, or a computer afterward, understand the third dimension. That could be useful as a way to help the camera figure how best to focus and expose the a shot. More dramatically, it could lead to three-dimensional hologram shots, assuming somebody crafts economical way to view such data.
One 3D idea comes from Stanford University, where Keith Fife and colleagues have created a camera image sensor that can gauge depth. That sensor works by using hundreds of tiny lenses over the sensor pixels; by comparing the subimages from each subarray of pixels, a computer can judge how far away various features are.
A related technology, from start-up Refocus Imaging, produces data files that can be processed to focus the camera after the photo has been taken. It also can be used to deliberately bring a background into focus or to blur it so it's not distracting.
Essentially, Refocus Imaging substitutes a computer for camera optics. "Computational optics is the next frontier...We can process in software to do what the hardware usually has to do," said Chief Executive Ren Ng.
Making that change could mean the centuries-old, highly refined, sedate optics field could be replaced by breakneck computer industry rates of change.
"You get the ability to scale performance much faster--a curve that looks like Moore's Law," the famous and largely accurate observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that computer chips get double the number of transistors every two years.
The Refocus Imaging technology is based on a concept called the light field, a much richer description of light entering a camera. Capturing the light field requires very different processes from conventional cameras, but Adobe thinks it will be built in.
The array of subtly different images of the same scene that Adobe's plenoptic lens produces.
(Credit: Adobe)"If light field photography becomes much more prevalent, which we believe will happen over time, we think will be much more convent to have it built into your camera," Connor said in a recent speech at the 6sight conference on digital imaging. "We're trying to be a catalyst to get this to happen."
Adobe's plenoptic camera lens can help create a 3D representation of a scene.
(Credit: Adobe)Adobe also is working in the new domain. It's been showing a prototype camera with a "plenoptic" lens--one made of many smaller lenses. A computer processing the subimages, each with a slightly different perspective, can reconstruct 3D attributes.
Adobe, seeing things in perspective to its image-editing business, envisions a tool that could let you edit only areas of a photo that were close to the photographer. For those who have struggled for hours with detailed masking operations to separate foreground from background, that sort of idea probably sounds like a potential godsend.
But such technology currently exceeds the power of ordinary computers, Connor said in an interview: "It's definitely more computationally intense than the stuff we're typically doing in Photoshop."
But as so many industries have discovered, it's generally a bad idea to bet against Moore's Law.
Most folks think of a photo as a two-dimensional representation of a scene. Stanford University researchers, however, have created an image sensor that also can judge the distance of subjects within a snapshot.
To accomplish the feat, Keith Fife and his colleagues have developed technology called a multi-aperture image sensor that sees things differently than the light detectors used in ordinary digital cameras.
Each subarray on the multi-aperture sensor captures a small portion of the overall image, a portion that overlaps slightly with that of the neighboring subarrays. By comparing the differences, a camera can judge the distance of elements in the subject. (Note that this mock-up differs from reality, in which each subimage would be rotated 180 degrees, but this makes the idea easier to grasp.)
(Credit: Keith Fife/Stanford University)Instead of devoting the entire sensor for one big representation of the image, Fife's 3-megapixel sensor prototype breaks the scene up into many small, slightly overlapping 16x16-pixel patches called subarrays. Each subarray has its own lens to view the world--thus the term multi-aperture.
After a photo is taken, image-processing software then analyzes the slight location differences for the same element appearing in different patches--for example, where a spot on a subject's shirt is relative to the wallpaper behind it. These differences from one subarray to the next can be used to deduce the distance of the shirt and the wall.
"In addition to the two-dimensional image, we can simultaneously capture depth info from the scene," Fife said when describing the technology in a talk at the International Solid State Circuits Conference earlier this month in San Francisco.
The result is a photo accompanied by a "depth map" that not only describes each pixel's red, blue, and green light components but also how far away the pixel is. Right now, the Stanford researchers have no specific file format for the data, but the depth information can be attached to a JPEG as accompanying metadata, Fife said.
Recording photos in three dimensions is a pretty radical overhaul of the concept. Depending on your preferences, it could be anything from an exciting new frontier to the latest annoying digital gimmick.
Either way, you'd best start thinking about the implications because Fife isn't the only one working on the challenge. Image-editing powerhouse Adobe Systems has shown off some 3D camera technology too. It should be noted, of course, that stereoscopy itself is an old and respected photographic subject.
Even if you don't want to print holographic pictures of your new kitten, I suspect that 3D technology could help with some traditional photography challenges. Just as face detection can make a camera decide better where to focus and how to expose a shot, having a depth map could make this sort of calculation that much more sophisticated.
This diagram shows the multi-aperture sensor, which puts a small lens over a group of image sensor pixels. Each subarray gets its own microlens.
(Credit: Keith Fife/Stanford University)
Other advantages
Depth isn't the only potential advantage of the multi-aperture approach, Fife said. It could also help reduce noise, which in digital photography takes the form of colored speckles that are a particular plague when shooting at higher ISO sensitivity settings.
The noise is reduced because multiple subarrays capture the same views. It's therefore easier to distinguish true color of the subject from off-color noise. In addition, each subarray can be set to record a specific color, which could reduce the "color crosstalk" of current image sensors, he said. Today's "Bayer" pattern sensors employ a checkerboard of red, green, and blue pixel sensors, but bright red light captured by a red pixel can, for example, leak out a bit and affect the neighboring blue and green pixels.
Each subarray gets its own microlens. Although that complicates the manufacturing of the sensor, it could simplify the lenses used in existing cameras, Fife said. And lens manufacturing today certainly has no shortage of difficulties with a variety of exotic glass and even fluorite crystal elements, aspherical elements, and other avant-garde optics.
"There is opportunity for most of the complexity of the lens design to sit at the semiconductor rather than at the objective lens," Fife said. "Although the local optics (on the sensor) may be challenging, it is possible that the optics can be better controlled with lithography and semiconductor processes than with the injection molding and grinding that is used in the conventional camera lenses."
The microlenses might even be all that's needed for some applications, such as taking super-closeup "in vivo" photos inside plant and animal subjects where there's no room for a camera, Fife said. "The multiaperture sensor can form images at close proximity...because no objective lens is needed," Fife said.
This photo shows the prototype chip with 12,616 subarrays. Each pixel on the chip is 0.7 microns on edge, and the chip consumes 10.45 milliwatts of power.
(Credit: Keith Fife/Stanford University)
No free lunch
Lest you get carried away by the technology, you should be aware of a number of caveats:
• Because the same subject matter is captured redundantly by multiple pixels, the ultimate sensor resolution is lower than the raw number on the overall sensor.
• Processing the image, both to figure out how to merge the subimages into one overall image and to create the depth map, takes about 10 times as much processing horsepower as conventional on-chip image processing. Cameras already are battery hogs, and nobody wants to draw any more power or slow down camera performance.
• 3D images are possible only with subjects that have texture and other detail. "If a picture is captured of a perfectly smooth white wall, it is impossible to estimate the distance to that wall," Fife said.
So those are the downsides, but that's par for the course with new technology. And even if the technology never materializes, it's a strong indicator of the radical transformations that are in store for digital photography.
An overhead view of U2's drummer, Larry Mullen, from 'U2 3D.'
(Credit: 3ality Digital Productions)Having now seen U2 3D, I can confidently say the era of three-dimensional movie-making is upon us. The movie shows what 3D can be if done right, and more important, it shows it works with real humans, not just computer-generated subjects.
I saw Beowulf in 3D three times to compare the three major 3D display technologies, Imax, Dolby 3D, and Real D. That movie was a great proof-of-concept for the projection technology, but Beowulf itself was hardly a cinema classic.
In addition, with computer graphics, a filmmaker can exert complete control over the virtual cameras. But Beowulf whetted my appetite, and I wanted to see what could be done with actual humans in a 3D movie.
U2 3D faced real-world challenges. In 3D movie-making, the two cameras must be correctly aligned, the right distance apart, and with proper convergence, in which the cameras point slightly toward each other. That's a lot of complication, but the 3ality Digital Production guys got it right.
The result is a film that achieves a new spaciousness and depth. It offered a spectacle without many spears-jumping-down-my-eyeballs gimmicks.
When the camera is peering down at drummer Larry Mullen from above, I felt like I was really hanging above him. When there's a sea of waving arms between the camera and Bono, you can sense each row of the crowd. Visually, my favorite moment, by far, was the seething crowd jumping in sync to "Where the Streets Have No Name."
Editing, too, is a challenge with 3D. When cutting from one scene to another, there has to be enough time for the audience's eyes to adjust to a new focus point--or somebody has to plan in advance to keep the focus point at the same distance.
Here, too, U2 3D fares well, though it felt a little too choppy in the opening scenes to me. Whatever the cause, though, I'm happy to bid adieu to the frenetic MTV jump-cut editing style, and U2 3D was easy on the eyes.
I found low-angle crowd shots immersive.
(Credit: 3ality Digital Productions)There were plenty of flaws that I found distracting. The worst, ghosting, I blame on the Imax technology used during my screening. When Beowulf suffered ghosting, in which a bit of information intended for the right eye leaks over into your left eye and vice-versa, the Imax folks said it was something wrong with the theater, but it happened again in U2 3D. I also found shots directly at bright lights suffered distracting artifacts, which may or may not have been the fault of the 3D aspects of the movie.
I also thought subjects in fast motion were marred by flickering. The digital projection systems, which can take advantage of the higher frame rates possible with Texas Instruments' DLP chips, are better in this department, too.
The Imax show did have terrific sound and, of course, an all-encompassing screen that's effective in grabbing your attention all the way to its peripheral vision. And Imax will be going digital this year, so these issues should be only temporary.
U2 3D sticks fairly close to reality, but it's artfully laced with extra elements. I enjoyed the superimposition of images tremendously, with different views shown at different depths. For example, more than once a view of the band members on stage would be visible within the dark silhouette of Bono in the foreground. It was a new twist to multiple exposures.
Also well done were computer effects that usually complemented the giant display wall actually at the concert. Some purists might want a less adulterated representation of the band's "Vertigo" tour, but I for one wasn't fooled into thinking I had front-row seats, so the extras were fine by me.
Overall, the movie was immersive and entertaining. No doubt the novelty of 3D will wear off over the years, just as it did with color and sound in earlier years of cinema, but for now, my advice is to relish it.
Loreo's lens for taking stereo photographs, shown here mounted to a Canon SLR.
(Credit: Loreo)I have had a pet interest in the 3D photography technology called stereoscopy ever since my mom gave me a stereoscope of 19th century design for some boyhood birthday. Although the technology remains a small niche of photography, it is being adapted to the digital age.
I recently came across the Loreo 3D Lens in a Cap, a stereo lens that works on most film or digital SLRs. It's a 38mm lens with an f/11 of f/22 aperture that takes two images of the same scene from slightly different perspectives.
With stereoscopy, your brain can reconstruct depth information from the two images, just as it does with the two views from your eyes.
Loreo's 3D viewer
(Credit: Loreo)Loreo also sells a basic $24 3D viewer into which you can put 4x6 printouts of your stereo photos. The lenses cost between $48 and $117, depending on what model you buy.
(Via Red Ferret.)
Canon's EOS-1D Mark III
(Credit: Canon)Shortly after Canon announced a hardware fix for autofocus problems affecting some of its high-end EOS-1D Mark III cameras, the leading SLR maker also has added a software fix.
Version 1.1.3 of the Camera's firmware "improves autofocus tracking" when shooting outdoors in bright environments or when shooting low-contrast subjects, Canon said. In addition, the firmware can speed the process of writing images to high-speed SD memory cards.
Canon's biggest rival for single-lens reflex cameras, Nikon, also released some new firmware for its brand new D3 and D300 models that endows them with the color performance of the earlier D2X and D2Xs professional models. The updates don't yet appear on the U.S. Web site, but DPReview has a handy list of European links.
Canon also announced in a service notice that it will begin repairs for affected customers beginning December 3 at a dedicated facility. The company will pay shipping both ways for affected customers and will install the firmware during the repair, but customers should brace themselves for a wait.
"Due to the anticipated volume, we ask for your continued patience and understanding during this process," Canon said in the notice. "We offer our sincerest apologies to our customers using these products who have been inconvenienced by this issue."
The repair involves adjusting a mirror used in the autofocus subsystem and affects some cameras built with an original mirror mechanism. Cameras with an updated mirror mechanism aren't affected; those models have serial numbers above 546561, but there are also 2,713 models with lower numbers (yes, I counted) on a Canon list (click for PDF).
This shot of the queen floating eerily above Beowulf's head as if swimming in water showed off the possibilities of 3D computer-generated movies.
(Credit: Paramount Pictures)The race for the best 3D movie projection technology began in earnest last week with the release of Beowulf, and I'm here to judge the first lap.
Beowulf, which recounts the Anglo-Saxon adventures of a Swedish prince of that name, is the first wide release of a 3D movie, showing on hundreds of screens in 3D. And for the first time, viewers had the choice not only of watching with Imax 3D and Real D projection technology, but also newcomer Dolby 3D.
Based on watching the movie start to finish three times, the 3D winner is Dolby 3D--and not just by a nose.
Dolby's technology gave a sharp image that showed every beard bristle, the colors were relatively rich, flicker from moving objects was nonexistent, but most significantly, the sense of depth was strong. Even the subtle differences between a character's facial features were perceptible, and group shots with a host of characters showed as true depth, not as a number of gradually more distant two-dimensional layers. I was truly impressed.
Before I go further, a qualifier. Three viewings of this movie was a lot to endure, given the comic-book-grade plot and cardboard characters, but it's not much as statistical samples go to judge projection technology.
It's hard to say how much of my experience was based on the underlying merits of the technology and how much on the particulars of the theater and viewing. But the Dolby 3D experience was significantly better enough that I'm comfortable awarding it the crown.
This crossing-the-burning-bridge scene was supposed to be a 3D spectacle, but it wasn't as immersive as it could have been.
(Credit: Paramount Pictures)
Compare and contrast
All three 3D technologies were compelling, but none was perfect.
My first viewing was with Imax 3D, which was displayed on the company's famously large screens.
Of the three, Imax 3D was the most in-your-face experience of 3D effects, with swords, castle spires and spear points jutting sharply out of the screen. The company deliberately adjusts movie perspective to achieve this effect.
"When you experience 3D with us, you experience the 3D at the bridge of your nose. It is an immersive, full-contact experience," said Greg Foster, Imax's chairman and president of filmed entertainment. And he's right.
However, I was distracted many times during the movie by "ghosting," in which some of the light intended for the right eye leaks into the left and vice-versa. In high-contrast moments, such as a brightly glowing, gold drinking horn held against a dark cave wall, the result is dim secondary copies of elements of the scene.
More disappointing, though, was my befuddled perception of some high-motion 3D scenes. I often found it hard to track objects and people during fight scenes with rapidly moving objects and a whirling camera perspective, for example.
So when I went to my second viewing, in Real D, I was favorably impressed. It wasn't as crisply focused or immersive as Imax 3D, but there wasn't as much ghosting, and I had much better luck keeping track of the fast-moving scenes. For example, in one early scene where King Hrothgar flings gold coins at his subjects, I actually saw coins rather than distracting gold flashes.
Instead of occupying most of my field of vision, the action seemed to take place in a box on a stage in front of the audience. And most of the action was "behind" the front of the screen.
Dolby 3D was promoted earlier on Paramount's Web site, but it's not an option for the 3D theater search process.
(Credit: Paramount Pictures)The Real D audience seemed more wowed than Imax 3D viewers. Despite the more understated 3D, I observed a lot more flinching and startled gasping among audience members than in the Imax show.
Dolby 3D, though, beat out Real D for clarity, color, and coherent 3D. I was looking hard for ghosting and found it only twice, once with a sword and once with Grendel's mother's snaking tail. Many scenes that hadn't worked before came together--one example being the flying gravel pushed by Beowulf's ship as it's towed up the beach--and I found myself relishing the depth of flying dragons and other subjects. Falling snow, driving rain, and blowing embers imparted a feeling of space, not mere distractions.
That said, I still had problems. Not once was I able to make sense of the clouds of sand billowing around an underwater dragon or the froth of bubbles seen in the lair of the monster Grendel and his mother. A chain moving through a pulley knocked me cross-eyed. I also had troubles with foreground objects such as cave stalactites or characters half off-screen.
3D movies: The future
Beowulf is set in Denmark during the sixth century, the darkest of the Dark Ages, but watching it is a view into the future of movie making. I was impressed by various clips, but now having seen what a director with forethought can do with the technology and what it adds to the movie itself, it's clear to me 3D isn't just the flash in the pan it has been in the past.
For me, the 3D movie experience ranged from remarkable to gimmicky, but at no time did I find that it had faded unobtrusively into the background. No doubt part of that is because it's a spectacle that movie makers are using to pack theaters and charge premium prices.
The three 3D technologies all share a common principle: alternate rapidly between two slightly different vantage points, one for the left eye and one for the right, so human brains in the audience can reconstruct the third dimension just as they do in the real world. To keep left-eye light out of the right eye and vice-versa, the audience wears special glasses; the cheap cardboard hand-outs with red and blue plastic lenses are long gone.
There are differences, of course, in the projection technologies. Imax 3D, with about 120 3D screens installed so far, uses the oldest approach--two separate but synchronized reels of film and polarized light to split the views--though it will start going digital in 2008. Real D, whose technology is on more than 1,000 screens, uses a digital projector passed through a device that polarizes light one way and another for each eye.
Dolby 3D, which just entered production and so far is only on 75 screens, uses filtering technology so that the left and right eyes see images composed of slightly different hues of red, green, and blue. That approach caused problems for me seeing The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which elements of even red were hard to look at because the right-eye channel was significantly more orange.
Beowulf's computer-generated images are based on the real movements of actors digitized with motion-capture systems. Although I can't stand the characters' resulting rubbery features and robotic hands, the technique is a good foundation for 3D movies.
With the in-computer virtual "filming," the camera's perspective can shift gradually or dramatically, taking the audience with it. With computer-generated movies, those radical perspectives are nothing new, but 3D adds a new element. For example, when the still-unseen monster Grendel shatters open the door of Heorat, King Hrothgar's mead hall, the camera slowly moves to the front of the hall, and the sense of dread is all the greater as the vantage point approaches the entrance where we expect a vile demon.
Imax 3D gets top billing on Paramount's Web site.
(Credit: Paramount Pictures)The movie, however, seemed adapted for the constraints of 3D display. One problem, for example, is that 3D movies are significantly dimmer, in part because each eye is effectively seeing black half the time and because necessary filters cut down light even more. In what was likely not a coincidence, Beowulf seems to take place entirely during the dark days of northern-latitude winter and is set mostly in wanly illuminated halls and caves.
Overall, though, the experience was engaging, even the third time around. And I recommend checking the movie out in whatever 3D format you can find. Imax's Foster makes a compelling point about the merits of 3D. And even though I'm not a big movie buff, I agree.
"What's happening is a lot of 15- to 30-year-old people were staying home, watching movies on 72-inch plasma screens and not going to the movies the way I was going when I was a 15-year-old," Foster said. "We need technologies to get them to realize they can't replicate the movie-going experience (found) in a movie theater."
Imax is following the smaller-format movie industry to digital projection technology a bit more rapidly than earlier planned.
The company plans to install three prototype systems in the second quarter of 2008 with a full transformation in the second half of the year. Previously, the company had planned to begin the transformation sometime between late 2008 and mid-2009, the company said.
"Several key exhibitors, studios and consumer research groups have already experienced the digital prototype we've been running for the past several months, and we are very encouraged by the unanimously positive reaction to the next iteration of the Imax experience," said Richard Gelfond and Bradley Wechsler, Imax's co-chairmen and co-CEOs, in a statement.
Digital movies require expensive new projectors, but they offer some advantages. Digital movies don't wear out with multiple showings, as film does, the image is steadier, and studios don't have to create expensive prints. And digital copies being cheaper, it's easier to launch a movie on a grander scale to head off sales of pirated copies.
And digital display also is a better foundation for 3D movies, which already are an element of the Imax business.
Dolby has signed up a passel of cinemas to use its Dolby 3D movie technology, the company announced Monday.
At the ShowEast conference Monday, the company offered a list of independent and chain theater companies that will use Dolby 3D: Carousel Cinemas, Cinema City, Cinetopia, Cobb Theatres, Kerasotes Theatres, Malco Theatres, Marcus Theatres, Maya Cinemas, Megaplex Theatres, Starlight Cinemas, Sundance Cinemas, Warren Theatres, Kinepolis Group of Belgium and Supercines of Ecuador.
But Dolby still isn't saying how many screens total are equipped with its technology, a key measurement of how the relative newcomer is faring against incumbent Real D. The finish line, or at least then end of this lap of the competition, is the November 16 debut of Beowulf, a Paramount Pictures film directed by Robert Zemeckis that will be available in a 3D version. Real D said it will have more than 1,000 screens equipped with its technology by the debut, but Dolby 3D is just getting started with its technology.
Theaters considering the options have to weigh several concerns, among them financial. Dolby 3D sells its equipment for about $18,500, whereas Real D rents it for about $20,000 a year. But Dolby 3D's complicated glasses cost about $50 each to 50 cents for Real D's disposable plastic ones. Dolby 3D can use ordinary white movie screens, but not necessarily the largest ones; Real D needs special $5,500 silver screens to be installed but can use larger ones, permitting more audience members to watch a single screening.
Already in on the 3D movie action, though on a smaller scale than Real D, is Imax, which boasts of a more immersive experience by virtue of curved screens designed to fill up more of a viewer's peripheral vision.
Canonical plans on Thursday to release "Gutsy Gibbon," the Ubuntu Linux version 7.10 that the company hopes will lay the foundation for a serious push into the server and other markets six months from now.
That's when Gutsy Gibbon's sequel, "Hardy Heron," is scheduled to arrive. Gutsy Gibbon will have the usual Ubuntu support life span--18 months--but Hardy Heron will be the company's second version to feature long-term support, which lasts three years for the desktop product and five years for the server.
Some of the Gutsy Gibbon work involved introducing new features Canonical hopes to stabilize for Hardy Heron, said Canonical's chief executive and founder, Mark Shuttleworth. Take, for example, the "tickless" kernel, which is designed to reduce power consumption and improve server virtualization performance by letting the processor enter a somnolent state more often.
"I'm quite glad we're not trying to make the decision between tickless and long-term support. This is a fairly radical piece of surgery on the kernel," Shuttleworth said.
Among other Gutsy Gibbon developments are snazzy 3D graphics for the desktop version, desktop search called Tracker and the first incarnation of a Ubuntu Mobile version for portable gadgets.
Building a server team
At the same time, Canonical also is expanding support and development staff for the server push, which as with Linux leaders Red Hat and Novell is where the vast majority of money is made in the Linux business.
"The team has grown quite a bit. That's in preparation for our LTS (long-term support) release, which will be based on the April 2007 release," Shuttleworth said. To lead the server team, currently at about eight employees and counting, Canonical hired Rich Clark, whose financial services background gave him experience with high performance, reliability and virtualization.
The team also has begun working directly with server makers to ensure the software works on their x86-based machines--not just the ones available when Hardy Heron launches, but the new servers that will also arrive during the software's five-year lifespan.
"There will be a fair amount of hardware enablement after the release. That's not something that's been done in the past," Shuttleworth said. Although the work will stop short of full-on certification, Shuttleworth said, "We're confident we can do all the engineering required to make it just work."
Canonical has focused on desktop computing as a way to get programmers and enthusiasts interested in Ubuntu, hoping that ultimately will lead to use in the server market. Shuttleworth, who grew rich off his sales of Thawte Consulting to VeriSign for $575 million in 2000, is willing to be patient in the transition from Ubuntu popularity to Canonical profitability.
"The transformation we're trying to bring about will take years," he said. "What we're trying to achieve is very substantial shift in the operating system landscape. It's a huge, entrenched industry, where one shouldn't expect it to turn on its head."
Canonical has made some inroads, including a certification deal with online e-mail software maker Zimbra and a partnership to power Linux laptops from Dell.
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, co-founders of Zend, provide a useful view of Ubuntu's spread: their commercially supported open-source PHP software, which lets programmers at sites such as Facebook and Fiat create dynamic Web pages, is most often used on Linux. Debian is still used more often than Ubuntu, but the latter is used by programmers and is spreading, Suraski said.
Canonical is growing. It now has about 120 employees, of whom 70 are programmers.
New features
The new 3D desktop interface is the "most visible" new feature in Gutsy Gibbon. "It's also the most risky," Shuttleworth said, and deciding whether to include it triggered "a lot of debate at highest levels of the board."
Compiz software enables flashy 3D effects, such as this 'wobbly windows' plug-in.
(Credit: Compiz.org)But Canonical wanted to get it settled before releasing Hardy Heron with its long-term support requirements. "We think this really is a hotbed of innovation," Shuttleworth said. "Ultimately we took the decision to take the risk and enable this functionality by default."
One problem with the interface stems from its use of the OpenGL 3D graphics standard. That breaks other applications, such as computer-aided design software, that also use OpenGL. Those computer users will have to disable the interface, Shuttleworth said.
Advanced Micro Devices' decision to help Novell and others create an open-source driver for its ATI line of video cards helped push Ubuntu programmers to adopt the to 3D interface, Shuttleworth said. Currently, 3D acceleration typically requires proprietary video driver software, which is hard to support on Linux and distasteful to many.
Among other Gutsy Gibbon desktop features are plug-and-play function to more easily install proprietary or missing software to play audio and video files; easy support for multiple monitors; the ability to read and write from hard drive partitions using Microsoft Windows' NTFS file system using the Fuse software.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, a distribution of the Linux kernel and higher-level packages that's been around for years. Canonical releases new versions every six months, but versions with long-term support arrive only every two years under current plans.
Shuttleworth established it with a major difference over what leaders Red Hat and Novell have done: the free product and the supported product are the same. The rivals sell support subscriptions only to their for-fee version, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise Server.
Shuttleworth wants Ubuntu to grow as fast as possible, but he won't follow in Red Hat's footsteps by shifting to a fee-only supported version after gaining market share with a free product.
"I don't think we would survive a transition like that," Shuttleworth said. "The industry already effectively has got proprietary free-software providers. We wouldn't add anything."
SAN FRANCISCO--It looks like Nikon, having followed Canon into the market for high-end SLRs with full-frame image sensors, will continue the effort by offering lower-end models as well.
Nikon's $5,000 D3, due to ship in November, employs a full-frame image sensor.
(Credit: Nikon)Nikon's $5,000 D3 camera, announced in August and due to go on sale in November, employs a sensor the size of a full frame of 35mm film. These FX-sized sensors offer higher sensitivity and a broader field of view than the smaller DX sensors Nikon has used in its SLRs until now. Nikon will develop new DX-based cameras, but the company will flesh out its FX line as well, said Steve Heiner, senior technical manager of Nikon SLR marketing.
"I think you'll see other FX products. It's a sensor size we're committed to," Heiner said at a meeting here with reporters.
Heiner wouldn't offer details about timing or models, but extrapolating from his remarks, it looks like Nikon will offer a lower-end full-frame model. Full-frame technology will spread to lower-end cameras, Heiner said. "We have seen so many technologies at the highest end that migrate downward," he said.
The digital SLR (single-lens reflex) market is hot, with electronics giants Sony, Samsung and Panasonic giving new competition to the traditional powerhouses Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Pentax. One reason camera makers are pouring resources into the area is because profit margins and growth are better than with compact cameras; InfoTrends predicts that SLR shipments in North America will increase from 2.2 million this year to 3.2 million in 2011, while compact camera sales will peak in 2009. Another reason: SLR owners can turn into long-term customers because the incompatibility of other companies' lenses and camera bodies makes it expensive to change brands.
SLRs are costlier and bulkier than point-and-shoot cameras, but they offer much snappier response, better performance in low light, interchangeable lenses and the option of extensive manual control. SLRs are particularly popular with parents who are frustrated by the sluggish response time of most compact cameras.
A mid-range full-frame SLR could help Nikon counter Canon, whose full-frame models include not only the $8,000 top-end EOS-1Ds Mark III, to ship in November, but also the $2,300 EOS 5D that's been on sale for two years.
Asked specifically if Nikon plans a 5D equivalent, he wouldn't share specifics, but did add that it "doesn't take a rocket scientist" to see the D3 has tantalized some photographers who aren't served by the D3. "That leaves a lot of other photographers out there intrigued."
One complication of full-frame SLRs is lens compatibility. Because a DX sensor is physically smaller, it has a narrower field of view than an FX-based camera using the same lens. That means, for example, that a DX-based Nikon D300 with a 50mm lens will cover the same scene as an FX-based Nikon D3 with a 75mm lens. One effect of the change was that Nikon photographers buying early SLRs from the company had to buy new wide-angle lenses.
Most folks don't need to worry much about the different sensor sizes, but one group does: those in the DX market today who are candidates who could be interested in an FX camera in the future.
The image sensor in Nikon's D3 camera is just a hair smaller than a full frame of 35mm film.
(Credit: Nikon)Those people, chiefly enthusiasts and pros, should think twice before buying a DX-specific lens. Although it likely will be lighter and cheaper than an FX-compatible equivalent, it'll work only in a limited way on FX cameras. (DX lenses won't necessarily shine light on the full FX sensor, so Nikon's D3 by default crops the image to a lower-megapixel DX-sized patch of the sensor.)
Nikon and Canon took divergent strategies with their full-frame SLRs. Canon made the move first, beginning in 2002, when many fewer professionals had made the move from film to digital. That meant that group was better able to preserve their investment in lenses geared for 35mm film.
Nikon, though, waited until 2007, at which point many Nikon pros had already had to purchase new lenses to cover the wide-angle limitations of 35mm film lenses combined with DX-sized sensors. So now Nikon's push is aimed more at the higher sensitivity of its FX sensor. A physically larger sensor means each pixel can be made larger for a given sensor resolution, and larger pixels are better at distinguishing the light coming through the lens from electronic noise in the sensor.
The Canon 1Ds Mark III has 21.1 megapixels, a tally that should appeal to studio or landscape photographers or others who need very large images. The D3 has 12.1 megapixels, but offers ordinary sensitivity as high as ISO 6,400 and high-range of 12,800 and 25,600. That's likely to appeal to sports photographers who have fast-moving subjects and to news and wedding photographers who must shoot in low-light situations.
One wild card in the SLR future is Sony, which got a running start in the SLR market by purchasing the assets of Konica Minolta. Its current Alpha A100 and imminent A700 models use smaller sensors, but some expect a full-frame option soon when the company releases a professional model in development now.
