I think I know why Canon sensors lagged behind Sony's...

John from PA wrote in post #15065619
Interesting concept.

While working in the yard today I listened to AM talk radio on a Nordmende Globetraveler Jr. purchased in 1963. I also happen to have my father's, purchased at the same time. German electronics of course...

Nordmende... Our first color TV was Nordmende... I think my parents still have it! lol!

Ha.. I am still reading the patent from the rumors thread.. You reading skills are obviliously faster due to reading all those complaints

jblaschke wrote in post #15065692
Sony has something of a financial advantage because of A) contracted market share and B) extensive electronics R&D dating back decades.

The data suggests otherwise.
Sony has been a mess financially for many years running now...
The Koreans ate its lunch and now the Chinese are eating its jello pudding.

Sure, the sensor division is doing great, but it's not unaffected by the entire company's financial troubles.

Canon, OTOH, is solid as a rock so far...

andrikos wrote in post #15065823
Should I guide you to the definition of "hyperbole for effect"?

Considering technical people, you'll lose much of your audience with the hand waving I only read further to make sure that someone else had called you on it!

The Dark Knight wrote in post #15065634
Let me ask you a question cause I've been curious about this. Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Pentax basically own the DSLR market in the USA, right? Am I right that only Canon develops and uses their own senors, and the rest use Sony sensors?

Why does Canon do this?

Better question, who do you think gets the best lots of Sony Sensors? Do you think they ship them off to their competition?

Canon is a huge company that long ago started making their own sensors, Nikon is small in comparison. I don't think people here appreciate how massive of a company Canon is and how expensive large chip R&D can be. It's cost prohibitive for Nikon to fund R&D of their own large sensors, but Sony is more than happy to bankroll the R&D and then pass those costs down to several companies willing to buy the sensors.

The per-pixel auto ISO is actually a really interesting idea. If you had a very small sensor with the same number of megapixels that is actually the metering sensor you could map the ISO level for the primary sensor at exposure time, if not, I think the camera would have to be mirrorless so that the camera knows how the light is hitting the sensor at all times. I'm not sure, even using a CMOS sensor with some intelligence built into the sensor, that it could make that kind of adjustment with very high shutter speeds in time, but then again the processing power of modern chips is truly breathtaking.

As far as the "everything would be muted", no, I don't think that is the idea. You would never have a blown highlight as the areas that are at 100% would auto ISO themselves down, and you'd never have a totally black shadow as those pixels would ISO up to keep the detail. Now you would have to do some tricks to keep those shadows from showing a lot of noise all the time if they are boosting like that.

I do feel that Canon is soon going to have to come out with something that is a game changer, they seem to have been sitting on the same sensor technology for a while now while their lenses just keep getting more and more amazing.

waterrockets wrote in post #15065866
Considering technical people, you'll lose much of your audience with the hand waving I only read further to make sure that someone else had called you on it!

He was counting the complaints in parallel universes.

ddk632 wrote in post #15065702
A new metering system would need to be developed that does "look" at the complete scene, and decides how to break up that scene, pixel by pixel, to increase ISO sensitivity in the potentially underexposed areas such as shadows or the foreground in a sunset scene. Why would this not be possible?

The resolution of the metering system would have to be the same as the resolution of the image sensor, not the 63 zones or so of current metering systems and both systems would have to be somehow synched up pixel by pixel, or a new sensor is developed where each pixel has a meter built in right next to it.

andrikos wrote in post #15065496
After reading through literally trillions and trillions of complaints over the last couple of years about the superiority on Sony's sensors (biggest imaging sensor manufacturer) I wondered why would that be?.

lit·er·al·ly   [LIt-er-uh-lee]
Actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy:

???

andrikos wrote in post #15065823
Should I guide you to the definition of "hyperbole for effect"?

You can't preface 'hyperbole for effect' with the word 'literally'.

Oh boy...
I had no idea OCD was so prevalent in the Photographic community...
OK, let me amend my comment:

After reading through literally ones and ones of complaints over the last couple of years about the superiority on Sony's sensors (biggest imaging sensor manufacturer) I wondered why would that be?

My sincere apologies.

Everybody happy? Can we move on now?

Copidosoma wrote in post #15065756
No reason why you couldn't record luminance values on a pixel by pixel basis. Doesn't the 1Dx already do that for metering (on 100K pixels)? Somewhere along the line you record how quickly each pixel goes from 0-256 or whatever and you have a record of relatively how "dark" that pixel is. The data stream would be absolutely massive but that is just a processing issue. Surely you could clip it to optimize the DR based on user settings (i.e. how much DR you want in the scene)......

This got me thinking. A better way would be to double the amount of luminescence levels, that is go from 256 to 512 (or more) This would allow for a serious increase in DR without the need of auto ISO on a per pixel level.

ANd thinking about the auto ISO on a per pixel level, how is that going to increase DR? You still have only so many luminescence levels to work with. All it's going to do is some form of single image HDR as the base sensor has not improved.

gjl711 wrote in post #15065909
The resolution of the metering system would have to be the same as the resolution of the image sensor, not the 63 zones or so of current metering systems and both systems would have to be somehow synched up pixel by pixel, or a new sensor is developed where each pixel has a meter built in right next to it.

Yes exactly - or as someone else suggested, the pixel data from metering can be mapped to the pixels in the sensor.

For pixel by pixel autoISO, you are correct, would need the same resolution; however for let's say 3x3 pixel grids, which may not be as acccurate, it would take a much less complex metering system. And for 5x5 pxels grids, even less.

All I'm saying is I would imagine the tech to progress from 5x5 pixel grids down to eventually per-pixel, but could be that this all gets skipped.

The comment about mirrorless also makes sense here, and sony's SLT translucent mirror tech seems to be another option that fits the bill. Will Canon come out with something similar? Or will metering data be superimposed over the sensor from live view or some other similar metering function if traditional DSLR mirror stays intact?

gjl711 wrote in post #15065953
This got me thinking. A better way would be to double the amount of luminescence levels, that is go from 256 to 512 (or more) This would allow for a serious increase in DR without the need of auto ISO on a per pixel level.

ANd thinking about the auto ISO on a per pixel level, how is that going to increase DR? You still have only so many luminescence levels to work with. All it's going to do is some form of single image HDR as the base sensor has not improved.

This may be true, but in the event that overexposure of part of a scene would blow highlights, if this would be prevented by the auto ISO per pixel, then more actual detail data would be recorded in those parts of the image that would have otherwise been blown. Same goes in the other direction with regards to noise.

andrikos wrote in post #15065947
Oh boy...
I had no idea OCD was so prevalent in the Photographic community...
OK, let me amend my comment:

After reading through literally ones and ones of complaints over the last couple of years about the superiority on Sony's sensors (biggest imaging sensor manufacturer) I wondered why would that be?

My sincere apologies.

Everybody happy? Can we move on now?

Personally, I liked the alternate universes explanation, but I can live with this too.

Keyan wrote in post #15065873
The per-pixel auto ISO is actually a really interesting idea. If you had a very small sensor with the same number of megapixels that is actually the metering sensor you could map the ISO level for the primary sensor at exposure time, if not, I think the camera would have to be mirrorless so that the camera knows how the light is hitting the sensor at all times. I'm not sure, even using a CMOS sensor with some intelligence built into the sensor, that it could make that kind of adjustment with very high shutter speeds in time, but then again the processing power of modern chips is truly breathtaking.

As far as the "everything would be muted", no, I don't think that is the idea. You would never have a blown highlight as the areas that are at 100% would auto ISO themselves down, and you'd never have a totally black shadow as those pixels would ISO up to keep the detail. Now you would have to do some tricks to keep those shadows from showing a lot of noise all the time if they are boosting like that.

If you just don't blow out the highlights, then you're essentially making "gray the new white." The previously not-quite-blown-out adjacent pixels will now be effectively blown out along with the others. Same with the blacks on the bottom side.

You would have to do some sort of curve for all the highlights and lowlights, and it would gray the image a bit, if only on the ends of the histogram. The key is that it needs to be a sensitivity adjustment to capture the resulting color, since red, green, and blue will rarely all hit 0 or 255 at the same time.

This is all assuming that you can do this analysis and adjust sensel-level ISO 46 million times while a thin 1/8000s pair of shutter curtains comes flying by.

andrikos wrote in post #15065947
Oh boy...
I had no idea OCD was so prevalent in the Photographic community...
OK, let me amend my comment:

After reading through literally ones and ones of complaints over the last couple of years about the superiority on Sony's sensors (biggest imaging sensor manufacturer) I wondered why would that be?

My sincere apologies.

Everybody happy? Can we move on now?

That's actually a lot less distracting. There are things on the Internet that people will just pick at, no matter the circumstance.