With the rise of sites like YouTube, the Internet is teeming with digital videos (two days worth are uploaded to YouTube every minute), but when was the last time you stopped to think about how video works? Here’s a fascinating video in which Michael from vsauce explains everything from beta movement to frame rates.
A study conducted by market research firm J.D. Power and Associates has found that “Nikon Pro Series” DSLRs rank highest in customer satisfaction. The company surveyed 4,500 verified online DSLR buyers to find out their satisfaction across five factors: image quality, durability, features, ease of use, and responsiveness.
The Nikon Pro Series ranks highest in online buyer satisfaction with a score of 914. The Nikon Pro Series performs particularly well in shutter speed/lag time, durability and reliability and ease of operation. The Canon Mark-Series follows in the rankings with a score of 909, and performs particularly well in performance and picture quality. The Canon D-Series and Nikon D-Series rank third in a tie, each with a score of 889.
Overall, customers were most satisfied with image quality but least satisfied with durability and responsiveness.
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Did you know that a third of the SanDisk memory cards being used on Earth are actually fake? A SanDisk engineer recently shared this startling fact with a reader over at The Online Photographer:
[...] at any given time, approximately a third of the SanDisk memory cards (made by Toshiba) being used out there in the world are counterfeit. As in, not SanDisk memory cards at all—some other kind of cards dressed up as lookalikes.
Thirty percent, was the number quoted. A third, more or less.
To make sure you’re getting the real thing, always purchase your memory cards from reputable dealers.
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As the low-light capabilities of high-end (and even low-end) cameras rapidly improve, it’s easy to marvel at technology and forget how amazing our own eyes are, but here are some mind-boggling facts to consider: did you know that the human eye can detect as few as two photons entering the retina, and that, under ideal conditions, a healthy young adult can see a candle flame from 30 miles away? To see how mind-boggling that is, try using Google Maps to find a location 30-miles away from where you live.
According to neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, the reason we don’t utilize our full sensory potential is because we’re not paying enough attention to them — kinda makes you want to put down your camera and focus on staring at things, huh?
We are all inattentive superheroes (via Boing Boing)
Image credit: Eye by Furryscaly
Color photography was born on this day 150 years ago in 1861 when Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton — inventor of the SLR camera — shot the above photograph of a colored ribbon.
[...] Maxwell proposed that if three black-and-white photographs of a scene were taken through red, green and violet filters, and transparent prints of the images were projected onto a screen using three projectors equipped with similar filters, when superimposed on the screen the result would be perceived by the human eye as a complete reproduction of all the colours in the scene.
During an 1861 Royal Institution lecture on colour theory, Maxwell presented the world’s first demonstration of colour photography by this principle of three-colour analysis and synthesis, the basis of nearly all subsequent photochemical and electronic methods of colour photography. Thomas Sutton, inventor of the single-lens reflex camera, did the actual picture-taking. He photographed a tartan ribbon three times, through red, green and blue filters. [...] Because Sutton’s photographic plates were in fact insensitive to red and barely sensitive to green, the results of this pioneering experiment were far from perfect. [#]
Thus began modern color theory and the fundamentals behind how your DSLR captures color.
(via Popular Photography)
Dutch consumer product website Beste Product (“best product”) decided to set up a royal rumble between the two heavyweights of the camera industry: Canon and Nikon. They created an infographic comparing the two companies in things such as expert and user opinions, popularity, and sales. Even if you’re sick and tired of the endless comparisons and debates (as you should be), the infographic provides some interesting facts about how the two companies are doing.
Infographic after the jump
When learning about ISO, you’ve probably heard that the lower the number, the lower the noise and the higher the image quality, but did you know that this isn’t always the case? The reason is something called the base (or native) ISO of a camera — the ISO achieved without amplifying the data from the sensor. This is usually somewhere between ISO 100 and ISO 200. Why does this matter? Bob Andersson of Camera Labs explains:
We all know that using high ISO numbers results in more sensor noise. More surprising, perhaps, is that using an ISO number below the native ISO number also degrades the image.
An interesting example is that when shooting on a Canon EOS 1Ds MkII, ISO 50 has roughly the same signal to noise ratio as shooting at ISO 800. This explains why the lowest possible ISO numbers can only be accessed through custom functions on some cameras.
Know your Base (or Native) ISO (via Reddit)
Image credit: Photograph by Filya1
Did you know that the first digital camera invented in 1975 didn’t actually produce the first digital photograph? The first digital photo actually came almost two decades earlier in 1957 when Russell Kirsch made a 176×176 pixel digital image by scanning a photograph of his three-month-old son. The low resolution was due to the fact that the computer they used wasn’t capable of storing more information.
(via Discovery News)
This photograph of Boulevard du Temple in Paris was made in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, the brilliant guy that invented the daguerreotype process of photography. Aside from its distinction of being a super early photograph, it’s also the first photograph to ever include a human being. Because the image required an exposure time of over ten minutes, all the people, carriages, and other moving things disappear from the scene. However, in the bottom left hand corner is a man who just so happened to stay somewhat still during the shot — he was having his shoes shined.
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Here’s a fun bit of trivia: did you know that at one time Apple (then named Apple Computer) made compact digital cameras? Launched in 1994, the Apple QuickTake was actually one of the first digital cameras available to consumers. Three models were built by Kodak and Fujifilm, and the cameras boasted a whopping 0.3 megapixels and the ability to store eight photos at this resolution. The camera had a flash, but lacked zoom, focusing, image review, and file deletion (the entire contents had to be wiped).
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