Bob pushed the shutter button and … nothing happened. The stock passed into the hands of his son and the actual photos taken was part of a cheerleader pom-pom. Bob lose contact too. He resisted an insane incentive to shut the camera down and jump on it.
This was his first digital camera, and Bob had just suffered a nasty surprise. He had used film cameras all his life, but when his Yashica went into the shop a friend loaned him a digital camera. Naively decided to take some action scenes and found that most maddening "feature" of digital cameras – shutter lag.
Exasperating and frustrating
The articles on this topic have been attributed to shutter lag:
1. Activating the camera system
2. The time required for the digital camera to process the image
3. The reaction time of the photographer
The numbers one and three times lag most people who use digital cameras are used. Most have used a camera and I know that the needs of a few milliseconds to concentrate.
The obvious solution is to reduce the aperture to increase depth of field, or the camera lens to the object you want to be in focus and press the shutter button, to "tell" the camera that What to focus, then move the camera to center the image and press for the rest of the road.
The reaction time is human and not much has changed for users of film cameras, and people with experience in taking action shots usually get what they want.
So let's look at number 2, the time needed to process the image.
Time to make the transformation
Image processing (what the camera can be ready for the next) is available in different sizes to pass from the image sensor to flash memory card:
1. Color corrections. The camera has to review every charge transfer device (CCD) sensor element in the picture. It adds green, blue and red to achieve the correct color balance. For a 3 mega pixel camera, the processor has to make 9 million calculations.
2. Sharpness. This increases the contrast and sharpness of edge detection.
3. Compression. This process converts the 12-14 bits of each CCD sensor of 16 bits of "filling" of information and the compression to 8 bits. This compresses the file size to 9 megabytes.
These steps require a tremendous amount of computing time. No wonder Bob missed his shot!
Progress of
There are two ways to capture the action:
1. The method of "execution". If your camera has this mode, you can take a series of rapid shots moving through the event. This requires a camera with a large buffer "to keep the photos for prosecution.
2. Anticipating shots by pressing and holding the shutter button before the event. This requires the ability to predict the future, something most of us do not possess.
THE FUTURE OF FASTER SHOOTING
Course, this would be simplified if micro processing were faster. Even with large buffers, the speed at which data is transmitted to the processor is prohibited by the speed at which data is transmitted from the CCD. Micro processing speed is the bottleneck next.
Clock speeds and higher data transfer speeds to reduce or even eliminate "shutter lag" time. There are several technologies behind the scenes, that offer hope:
1. Nanotube and nanowire technologies. These are the descendants of "nanotechnology", the ability to make small cars nano level, a billionth of a meter in size, rather than a millionth of a meter (micrometer) and offer hope for a speed of 500 GHz clock or more.
2. DNA Yes, you heard right. Computer-DNA strands under which the information is stored and processed.
3. Other materials
• gallium arsenide with a speed much faster than has been used for years for military purposes.
• silicon germanium chips increase the transfer of light signals to silicon. These traditionally have worked best in the presence of extremely low temperatures, but computer simulations have shown that they can do to approach 1000 GHz (1 THz) at room temperature.
• Indium-antimonide. Much faster than silicon
• optical transistor. A glass material known as chalcogenide becomes a switch as its refracting properties are changed. No need to translate the photons in the rest.
• coated viruses. The latest research involves coating viruses with a conducting material. Much higher speeds at the molecular level can be obtained. This gives new meaning to the term "computer virus".
4. Parallel Processing. As we noted recently, the war between Intel and AMD on the number of parallel processors crammed into a CPU, digital camera processing would benefit from parallel processors handling of focus, clarity and compression.
5. Improving the efficiency of instruction, reducing lines of code would make the process more efficient.
HOLD ON AND WAIT FOR THE FUTURE
The real solution to this annoying shutter lag seems to be the material that the processor is built and the advancements in software.
But we have to wait a while 'for this. Although some alternative materials have been around for a while ', everything else is still under research and development. Even when it finally runs out of laboratories that can make your future digital camera cost about $ 10,000 to 15,000 $.
All prices for the ability to take pictures as fast as a camera! However …
Except for the delay, the digital camera is equipped with everything about film cameras, once the photo is captured from the memory card. The new technology will be worth the wait.
Digital camera owners are known for their ability to wait … in hand to deliver desperately trying to capture the fleeting smile of your new baby, or the football lands in the hands of eighteen years later, when he scored the winning touchdown.