Merrill

There are moments when I think the Internet connection I have is just fine. And then there are the reality check moments, when I feel like I had an equivalent of a 56kbps dialup service. This happens when I deal with the new developments in consumer video recording and photography.

A year ago I got myself the Samsung Galaxy Note I, a phone capable of recording HD video. Nice! And I took my first short video, just a few minutes long. Only to realize the video FILE is more than 1GB in size. So I have it. I have the video. There is no way to share it (without compressing and losing the quality). There is no way to carry more files like this one with me either. I backup them on my LAN NAS server, as this is the only place capable of dealing with 1GB files. It has 8TB of storage space and 1Gbps LAN interface.

A month ago I fell in love with the Sigma DP1 Merrill consumer compact camera. The Merrill is unusual. It is based on the latest Foveon X3 sensor (I wrote more on that 6 years ago: http://headworx.slupik.com/2007/02/x3-digital-film.html). And it probably is the first camera that proves X3 is the only technology able to push photo image capture resolution to the next frontier. The current frontier is about 17M pixels, which is considered the resolution of the high quality camera lens. Anything more than that is a waste, because the lens will not pass through enough image details to the sensor. X3 finds a way around that limitation by stacking the R,G, and B pixels one on top of another. So essentially you get 3x pixels without shrinking their size below the lens resolution. The Merrill produces 4704x3136x3 images, about 45M pixels in total on a surface of about 15M pixels. In the DP1 Merrill Sigma squeezed the 45M pixel sensor in a compact camera body. Which is not that very compact at all, but compact enough for me to put it in a pocket of my snowboarding jacket.

I love mountains and I love snowboarding. On some very rare occasions I was taking my DSLR to the top, to snap photos. But this required a backpack and riding with a backpack with DSLR inside is not a freeride. Now with the Merrill I can do both: freeride and perfect photos.

The Sigma is far from a perfect camera. It is slow. Does not last long on batteries. The display is hardly visible in sunlight. It requires slow and cumbersome post-processing on a computer. And starting with 50MB RAWs, you end up with TIFF files of about 80MB each. Or 350MB in 2x resolution. That is just one photo. You can have two on a CD. At the moment, as a novice Merrill adopter, I still have no idea what to do with the photos. They are so beautiful that downsizing does not make sense, as the resolution is why I got the camera in the first place. Sharing a set of 20 or 50 holiday photos to family and friends would take ages to upload and download would be long enough to discourage most of them to view the slideshow. Printing is not an option either, as with current technology the most you get is about 440dpi, so 1:1 each photo should be 7x10 inches. So I store them on my NAS, waiting for better times to come.

One day I hope I will be able to shot a 60fps, 3D movie with Merrill - size frame format. That is 6GB per second uncompressed (50MB/frame x 60fps x 2). Or 3.6TB for a 10-minute holiday clip. It would take 80 hours to upload to the Cloud using a 100Mbps uplink connection (my current uplink is 1Mbps, so it would take almost a year to send it up over the wire).

My take-away lesson from the short wither break is: digital media will keep pushing the Internet infrastructure to the limits for the foreseeable future. In 2018 a helmet - mounted camera (like the GoPro) will be capable of shooting 50Gbps stream. In 2018 many will enjoy 1Gbps fiber connections. And it will still take 8 hours to upload a 10-minute holiday clip to Facebook or YouTube.