
The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR - maxerickson
http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/
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tgb
Somewhat OT: I don't know much about photography but had always known DSLRs as
the gold standard for digital photography. I was surprised to learn that
there's actually a bit of a shift going on away from DSLRs towards "mirrorless
cameras". If you haven't heard about them, the differences are pretty
interesting. Basically, DSLRs are still like the one in this article - digital
sensors crammed into an SLR. Mirrorless cameras take more liberties, as if
they were imagining a digital camera from the ground up rather than starting
with an SLR. Eg: [http://photographylife.com/mirrorless-vs-
dslr](http://photographylife.com/mirrorless-vs-dslr)

~~~
georgemcbay
Photography is a hobby of mine. I currently use 2 camera bodies, one is a DSLR
(Canon 70D) and the other is mirrorless (Sony A7).

The Sony A7 has a full-frame sensor, which is pretty crazy considering how
relatively small it is (much smaller than the 70D body which holds a smaller
1.6 crop APS-C sensor) and under ideal conditions it produces better image
quality than the Canon 70D (slightly higher megapixels, but really the
physical size of the sensor is what puts it ahead with less noise, plus the
Sony sensor technology has better dynamic range).

The Sony A7 is the first camera I've used where the electronic viewfinder is
bright enough and fast enough that I can stand using it over an optical
viewfinder. And having reached that point it really opens up some great
abilities that you can't get with purely optical, like focus peaking (real-
time contrast/edge detection to show you which parts of the frame have the
sharpest focus) and high zoom in the viewfinder (both of which are really
useful especially when using older manual focus lenses which really shine on
this camera). Also, just plain seeing the image exactly like the sensor does
in terms of depth of field is a real game changer... and yes, you could
previously do these with liveview cameras on a bigger LCD attached to the
back, but the high-res, bright viewfinder is a really big deal for me as I
hate holding the camera away from me while looking at an LCD since it is much
harder not to cause sharpness-killing movement that way than when using your
face and arms as a sort of bio-tripod.

All that aside, DSLRs still currently win for fast autofocus. Pure phase
detect autofocus is just so much faster than the contrast autofocus used by
mirrorless cameras. For a lot of photos this doesn't matter, but for some it
does. See, eg:

[http://gmcbay.com/slideshow?postId=d80f062f-46e1-44c0-81e7-9...](http://gmcbay.com/slideshow?postId=d80f062f-46e1-44c0-81e7-9d8a6042ca0d&imgId=b3cea71c-0bf8-4c45-5142-e6df0852a6c2)

That is a photo I took last weekend with my Canon 70D. I often carry both
bodies (70D and Sony A7) with me when hiking, but there's no way I would have
gotten those hummingbird photos with the A7 (regardless of which lens I was
using on it) unless I was using manual focus and got really lucky with my
timing.

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FreakyT
Interesting! I always wondered why digital "conversion kits" for 35mm SLR
bodies never became more common -- I would have loved to convert my old Nikon
FE to digital.

~~~
porsupah
The problem isn't that it's impossible - the article demonstrates otherwise -
but that it's very difficult to pull off aesthetically well. Consider that
what you'd want to add, to be comparable to a conventional DSLR, would be the
sensor, LCD, image processor, additional controls, card cage(s), battery -
it'd all take up extra space, and all on the back of the body, rather than
integrated into the overall space of the body.

So, a fairly substantial engineering task, and that's only for a back which
would be designed for either a specific model of body, or a small number of
identically sized bodies.

Then consider the numbers you'd be likely to sell, versus competing with the
units rolling out of Nikon, Canon, et al.

Which is not to deny the geeky appeal of doing it anyway. =:)

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jrjarrett
Wow, this brings back some memories! I worked with Jim at Kodak on the later
DCS cameras; I was part of the team that wrote the Photoshop plugin, Camera
Manager and Photo Desk.

Most fun job I've ever had.

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Gracana
I'm kind of shocked by the quality. I've seen far worse from all manner of
cameras over the last decade or so.

~~~
roto
My company actually built one of the first fully digital aerial mapping
systems (commercially at least) using the slightly newer and publicly
available Kodak DCS's (~94). They were very nice cameras, especially for the
time. I cant even imagine doing this kind of work with film, it would be so
tedious. The speed to process the data was incredible when going all digital.
This made up for the loss in detail compared to film for most jobs, especially
since our costs were quite a bit lower.

Also interesting, is if i recall correctly Kodak actually made about 100
colour infrared versions too which was nice... until we couldn't reliably
source them out! We ended up having to burn the filter off of the CCD of the
standard RGB cameras systems with some sort of acid solution turning them back
into their natural CIR mode.

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tsotha
One thing struck me as being kind of strange. It seems the customer wanted to
hide the fact the camera was digital. To what end?

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userbinator
1.3MP (or 1.4 if you're marketing...) - pretty good for the late 80s, but
unfortunately it's not colour!

~~~
r4pha
I might be wrong, but I think adding color information would not be _that_
hard. Basically you could filter each sensor cell for one of the RGB colors
and just interpolate the results for each color channel. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing)

~~~
JamesMcMinn
That's exactly how the majority of digial cameras work today:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter)

