The best camera on the market right now is the Nikon D700 and the models above that. You will barely need to use a tripod again the low light performance is outstanding.
You can do great camera comparisons here...
http://www.dxomark.com/index.php
Yani said:The best camera on the market right now is the Nikon D700 and the models above that. You will barely need to use a tripod again the low light performance is outstanding.
Yep.
Also check www.kenrockwell.com for everything Nikon. I have a D50 and I love it. If you care, add a 50mm 1.8f lens, but the kit lenses at 18-55 are great.
Hi Phil,
I have never read anything about telescopes, so I know zero about them. Out of curiosity, do they use mirror lenses? If so, they have been available for SLR camera for decades.
Best regards,Brian.
Cameras have always been connectible to the telescope, the microscope and the endoscope.
Given they make all those devices I'm not sure what it is you expect them to 'discover'.
Those sorts of lenses are riddled with aberrations, curvature of field, poor light transmission rates, vignetting, have difficulty with f-stops/diaphragms, have poor depth of focus etc. Quality photographic lenses have special coating, use combinations of glass with different refractive indexes, use compound elements, have to optimise the rear focus point to have space for a mirror in SLRs, that is why wide angle lenses on SLRs are grotty they are retro-focus meaning the lens might have a focal length of 20mm but has to achieve that in a space of 30mm. And the reverse for telephotos, have you seen a 300mm lens that is 300mm long from where the aperture sits? You would end up with a 300mm lens that was 1/2 meter long at infinity and a meter long for close ups.
Telescopes don't matter as much as your eye and brain correct for the issues. You can look at something close up through a magnifying glass and see heaps. Try using one for a camera lens.
Besides the refractive index of glass?
It is all designed for a reason. You can buy cameras which use LCDs in place of a mirror and a prism. That has some design advantages and I'd love to be able to swap my prism for an LCD in certain circumstances but they are unpleasant if you need to manually focus.
You can make small high resolution sensors but for the same number of pixels they currently have a lot more noise.
You can make lenses with small apertures at smaller sizes but they won't allow you to take images with low depth of field.
If there was a potential revolutionary aspect to lens design, the competition is such that it would be out there now.
Hi Yani,
I used to play around with long exposures with torches back in the 80's when shooting film. I will have to buy a decent torch as I only have a couple of those small $5 torches at the moment and they hardly light anything up. It will be a whole new learning game again as I can't remember what settings I used and how long I lit any given area for way back then. I might start off small with some indoor subjects.
I would love to see a couple of your torch images,
Set me an assignment, and not 'your desk' GAWD I'd have to clean up. Most of the stuff I have here is boring muck done for clients. A $5 touch is perfect. LED ones aren't always great they can have a bit of color shift, mine is white in the centre and a bit green to the edges.
http://www.gizmag.com/liquid-pistons-for-mobile-phone-cameras/17559/
Liquid lenses...
Researchers at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute have developed "liquid pistons" that could be suited to a variety of applications. Using electromagnets the liquid pistons, which are highly tunable, scalable and have no solid moving parts, can function as pumps for lab-on-a-chip systems or could be used for adaptive lenses in future mobile phone cameras and implantable lenses.
several years back an Australian inventor came out with a lens that had virtually infinite depth of field. There was a special on this on TV, but I missed it. In the commercial advertising the show they showed a macro image taken ...... shot between the legs of a spider and the spider was in sharp focus, as was everything else in the room you could see between the spider's legs.
I never heard anything more after that. Did you see the show and do you know anything about this?