Another HDR camera
Thursday, February 19, 2009 | Permalink
Whoohaa, wouldn't have expected another company to get into the HDR field so quickly, but Ricoh just
announced the CX1 which also sports this features. They are taking a different approach though. Fujifilm went with a native HDR sensor, whereas Ricoh does the traditional combined exposures technique, except the camera does it automatically instead of relying on the user to do a lot of manual work at the computer to combine the images. It'll be interesting to see how well this turns out. It could potentially result in better image quality, but it could also be prone to mismatching exposures if you're shooting handheld, depending on the delay between the shots. It would also be nice if the camera did more than just two shots for greater dynamic range. With two vendors launching their HDR cameras so close to enough other I suspect we'll see more coming in the near future. In a few years we may be in a position where doing exposure digitally as a postprocess becomes as natural as doing white balance digitally.
Speaking of white balance, another very interesting feature of the camera is "Multi-Pattern Auto White Balance". It's a quite common problem that different areas of a scene is lit with different light sources and require diffent white balance to look good, for instance shooting indoor with a window visible. The indoor and outdoor parts of the image will require different white balance settings due to the difference in light temperature. But cameras apply one white balance setting to the whole scene. So either the outdoor will look very blue or the indoor very yellow, or neither will look correct. This camera is supposedly capable to doing white balance locally. How well this will work will be very interesting to see. From the description it sounds like it's applying white balance on a tile basis, so I suppose areas with pixels affected by both light sources may still look bad.
