Photography

Video technology has moved on so quickly, today you can even record video on your mobile phone.  It’s revolutionalised journalism, with reports and news video footage from places that  would have normally been impossible even 5 years ago.  Just think about the protests recently after the Iranian elections and how little would have been reported world wide had it not been for mobile phone video and chat rooms!

So is having a video capability on a stills camera just a marketing  gimmick?  Or could you use a stills camera to shoot your video?  Whilst the use of mobile phone footage on the news has very much seen the case of content being much more important than the actual quality, you couldn’t really justify it’s use over a good video camera on your media project without some artistic reason.  If ten years ago I’d presented the staff at BBC news channel with video content of this quality they would have refused to broadcast it and laughed me out of the room!

In our media world we’re only just beginning to get used to the idea of video cameras with solid state media cards rather than tape - I now warn you, your world is now about to be turned on it’s head!!!   The new kid on the block takes the capability of digital SLR’s to shot video to another level and will start to cause all sorts of dilemma.

The new Canon D5 Mk2 not only has a very large CCD (see “Size does matter!“) giving you true HD pictures at the chip, it also has a 3.5 mm jack audio input allowing you to record your own sound rather than use the internal microphone, plus it records directly onto the flash card in Quicktime format so iMovie and Final Cut have instant access.  Obviously being an SLR you have a huge availability of differing lens and……..  it retails at under £2,000 - cheaper than your semi-pro HD video tape cameras!  Plus your using standard Compact Flash cards the SLR which are far cheaper than the extortionate price companies like Sony are charging for the bespoke cards used in their semi-pro solid state tapeless video cameras.

Quick, go chat up the head of photography!

Have a look the above shot on the new Canon D5 MKII and take look at Damien’s Professional Blog PROPHOTONUT to find out a little more from a photographers point of view.

The retail trade would have us believe that increases in mega pixel numbers (mB) i.e. the number of pixels on the photographic chip, are directly proportional to getting better images from any new camera, whether video or stills.

This is in fact not completely true!!!

Another major attribute that affects picture quality is the actual physical size of that CCD chip (i.e. the actual size of each individual pixel), image quality is not just about the number of pixels.

My first Digital SLR camera was a Fuji Finepix S1 pro which proudly announced itself as having a 3.4 mega pixel. My mobile phone, a Nokia N95, boasts a 5 mega pixel camera. So I wandered into my garden this morning and took a picture with both.

Click to see full image

Even though the Nokia has 50% more pixels as the Fuji, the Fuji’s pixels are over 6 times bigger, spread over a chip area of 23.3 x 15.6 mm, where as the Nokia’s pixels are crammed onto a tiny chip just 4.8 x 3.6 mm.

Now I know that there are the factors of lens quality on each, but the fact remains that even though the pixel count of the Fuji is less, on picture quality the Fuji wins hands down. Each pixel has 6 times the available light to work with, therefore definition and contrast are better – especially in low light.

This is largely the reason why a digital SLR camera out perform its compact camera cousin, despite the pixel numbers being equivalent or even in some cases larger.

The same can be said of a professional video camera over a domestic or even semi professional camcorder.

So when the nice new camcorder you’re buying for your University/School boosts ‘HD’’ on the size, how much should you believe it?

I was recently tempted by an advert in my local Maplins Electronics store for an ‘HD’ camcorder for a mere £149. At that price I thought I had to try it!! After I got it home and shot a few scenes on it I transferred them to my computer for more critical analysis.

The resulting movies were quite disappointing and although the cheap lens obviously played its part, the tiny chip size simply let the pictures down. When you are trying to cram enough pixels onto a 1/3” chip to achieve HD status, you loose light sensitivity and image quality by making the pixels smaller.

You have to remember the chip in a HD video camera can be trying to create up to 150 frames of picture a second (Red, Green and Blue x 50), a stills camera has to reproduce just one frame. The more sensitive the chip and the faster it can work.

The BBC maintains that to record a ‘full’ HD picture, the bite rate (internal speed of the camera) must be above 50 megabits per second (mbs). Most domestic HD camcorders have bit rates as low as 5 mbs! Speed is another undeniable fact that contributes to better image quality.

So the bottom line is that for increased image quality of both video and still pictures then pixel numbers, though important, are far from the whole story. Overall chip size and the internal speed of the camera also have a huge effect on the actual quality. So when you see a piece of equipment labelled ‘HD’, don’t simply take it at face value, it maybe just good marketing!