Unfortunately, nothing is cited clearly in that article (shocker!). WP states the camera aperture is 12.52 by 7.41 mm (0.493 by 0.292 in). ![]() The fact that I'm creating a topic of this nature may come to a surprise to many of you, but I feel it's necessary because I'm getting at least three different answers based on my own research. If any engineers want to hop in here, I'd be much obliged-or if your name is Alan Lasky, Phil Rhodes, or John Sprung that is, anyone with a history of technical knowledge on display here. On a slightly related note, why do digital camera ADCs have a linear response in the first place? Why can't someone engineer one with a logarithmic response to light like film? The closest thing I've read about is the hybrid LINLOG Technology at Photon Focus which seems like a rather hackneyed approach. Panavision's solution, Panalog, can show the relationship between linear light values and logarithmic values after conversion in this graph: So I guess my question is, is it better to do straight linear A-to-D coding off the sensor and do logarithmic operations at a later time or is it better to do logarithmic conversion in camera to save bandwidth when recording to memory cards? As you can see here, the brighter stops are more efficiently coded because we don't need ~8000 values to see a difference, but the low end gets an excess of code values when there weren't very many to begin with. Meanwhile, on our other camera, 14-stops would each get ~73 code values (2^10 = 1024 then divided equally by 14) if we assume there is a 14-bit to 10-bit linear-to-log transform. That's not a lot of information to work with. The darkest stop (-13 below) is only represented by 2 values (1 or 0). In a 14-bit ADC camera, the brightest stop is represented by 8192 code values (16383-8192), the next brighest is represented by 4096 code values (8191-4096), and so on and so forth. Let's compare one 14-stop camera that stores data linearly and one that stores data logarithmically: ![]() If logarithmic coding is understood to mean that each stop gets an equal number of values, aren't the camera processors (FPGA/ASIC) merely interpolating data like crazy in the low end? Now, with respect to linear to log coding, some cameras are opting for this type of conversion before storing the data on memory cards the Alexa and cameras that use Cineform RAW come to mind. Given that fact, how were they measuring 13.5 in the real world? Of course, many of the first sensors were used in RED One bodies, which only have 12-bit ADCs. Not to pick on RED, but for the longest time, they advertised the Mysterium-X sensor as having 13.5 stops (by their own testing). If most modern cameras, Alexa especially, are using 14-bit ADCs, how are they deriving 14 stops of dynamic range? I read that the Alexa has some dual gain architecture, but how do you simultaneously apply different gain settings to an incoming voltage without distorting the signal? A pretty good read through regarding this technology can be found at this Andor Technology Learning Academy article. I did a lot of research on pipeline ADCs (which I believe are the correct type used) and the best one I could find, as defined by the measured ENOB (effective number of bits), was the 16-bit ADS5560 ADC from Texas Instruments it measured an impressive 13.5 bits. ![]() However, when we do introduce noise into the mix (sensor, transfer charge, ADC, etc.) and linearity errors, there really isn't 14 meaningful stops of dynamic range. A 14-bit ADC can store, at best (and ignoring noise for the moment), 14 stops of dynamic range. One thing we know from linear A-to-D quantization is that your dynamic range is a function of the number of bits of the converter chip. One thing I sometimes struggle to understand is how these newer cameras with 13+ stops of dynamic range are actually quantizing that information in the camera body. Digital cameras can do some amazing things nowadays considering where they were just even five years ago.
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