HDR cameras
Monday, February 16, 2009 | Permalink
HDR has been kind of a buzz-word in photography for the last few years. Some of this may be related to that HDR has also been a much talked about subject in GPU rendering in the last few years as well. There are techniques for taking HDR photos with standard camera equipment using multiple exposures. We've also seen photographic packages such as Photoshop adding this functionality. Meanwhile there have from time to time been talks about new sensor technology for HDR photography, although little has seen the light of day.
Last September Fujifilm
announced their new Super CCD EXR sensor promising improved dynamic range. Now that's something we've heard before, so I didn't pay much attention to it. Just recently they released the
F200EXR camera based on this sensor. It appears this might just be the first HDR capable camera on the market. I don't think it'll produce actual HDR images, but it can capture an 800% expanded range, or a 0..8 range if you will, tonemapped to a nice looking image where other cameras would either have to underexpose or get blown out highlights. The camera accomplishes this through pixel binning where different sensor pixels capture different exposure ranges. As a result, you'll only get a 6MP image instead of 12MP when using this technique, a tradeoff I'm more than willing to do. 12MP is already far beyond what's meaningful to put into camera anyway, particularly a compact.
Since the camera is new there aren't many reviews for it out there, but I've at least found
this Czech site which has some samples. If those are representative of what this camera can do this may very well be my next compact camera.
A word of caution though. Looking in the EXIF tags of the pictures it seems they aren't all straight from the camera. Some have the camera name listed, others have "Adobe Lightroom", suggesting that they may have been processed in some way. The first sample pair lists the camera name though, so I'm going to assume at least those are unprocessed.
In any case, this is a very exciting development. I hope to see similar technology from other vendors as well, and I would love to see this stuff in an SLR.
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Last comment by lone (2009-03-28 16:24:49) ]
