Reikan Technology, the company behind the FoCal automatic lens calibration tool, tells us that it has released a new web-based tool for researching the performance of camera and lens combinations.
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Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) charts are a very commonly used tool in the photo industry for measuring and describing how sharp a particular lens is. However, it’s a system that is largely enigmatic to those outside the realm of optic experts and camera gearheads.

For those of you who don’t want to learn how to read MTF charts, camera gear testing service DxOMark has announced a new metric that boils a lens’ sharpness down to a single easy-to-understand-and-compare number: the Perceptual Megapixel.
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Needing a way to test the speed of memory cards, Jaroslav of Crazy Lab realized that camera shutter sounds can do the trick. By recording the sound of his Canon 600D snapping away in continuous burst mode and then viewing them audio file, he was able to visualize the card’s speed and compare them against each other. He also learned some things about burst speed and ISO/format:

As you can see, the burst length is getting shorter with rising ISO. The time camera needs to write the buffer to the card is also significantly grown. The reason is the noise. On higher ISO settings we getting more noise in picture and noisy pictures are not good for compression. The RAW-File size (black picture shouted with closed lens cap) varies from 19MB @ ISO100 to 32MB @ ISO12800.

Also interesting is the comparsion of burst speed shooting in RAW versus JPEG. While the burst length with JPEG files is virtually infinite (with fast sd-card), the burst speed is slightly lower.

You don’t need anything fancy to do this experiement: Jaroslav used a webcam mic and the free audio program Audacity.

Measuring the performance of DSLR cameras [Crazy Lab]