美国佳能公司信息部负责人Chuck Westfall在接受PCPHOTO杂志采访时提到的一些佳能新技术：
PCPhoto: Currently, the biggest market for digital cameras
is the digital SLR. How is this increasing interest and demand
likely to affect the market?
Chuck Westfall: The digital SLR is definitely the hottest category
at the present time in digital cameras. The reality is setting
in that the market for compact digital cameras is starting to
plateau in sales. When profitability deteriorates, companies look
for other opportunities. The digital SLRs become exactly that. It’s
becoming more and more popular because prices are becoming
more affordable.
PCPhoto: What’s leading to the increased affordability of
these cameras?
Westfall: The volume in sales is what’s helping to drive the
costs down. In years past, the actual volume of cameras sold
wasn’t that much. As a result, it made it difficult for manufacturers
to reduce the price of the SLRs as compared to compact
digital cameras. Last year, 80 million compacts were sold as
compared to 4 million digital SLRs. Those are the things that
have a big impact on pricing.
PCPhoto: Who are the customers for these digital SLRs?
Westfall: The audience for digital SLRs is split between those
who are transitioning from 35mm SLRs to digital SLRs. But the
other half of the digital SLR market is certainly those making the
move up from compact digital cameras.
PCPhoto: What do you perceive as the important qualities
and features that photographers are primarily concerned with?
Is higher and higher resolution still key?
Westfall: What we’ve determined over the last year or two is
that people have moved beyond megapixels and into the other
aspects of image quality. They’re especially starting to notice the
level of noise that happens at the higher ISOs, because that’s
such an important part of how an SLR photographer likes to
shoot. They want to be able to shoot under low-light conditions
and they want the flexibility to decide whether or not to use
flash, rather than be forced to.
PCPhoto: Is the decreasing impact of noise happening as a
result of the sensors, software, or both?
Westfall: The sensors themselves are certainly making
progress in terms of combating noise. That’s why the CMOS sensors
are so highly regarded because they exceed what can be
done with the CCD in terms of conventional digital SLRs.
Overall, they offer better noise performance at high ISO speeds,
larger sensors for the money and lower power consumption.
We’re increasingly seeing improvement in the manufacturing
of sensors. Right now, we’re looking at
a native ISO sensitivity of 100 to 200,
but that could move up to 6400 and
higher very quickly. When that happens,
it will make a big difference in a
photographer’s ability to create images
under low light.
PCPhoto: Canon has been one of
the few companies to release a fullframe
SLR. While this has allowed photographers
to take advantage of their
lenses’ native focal length, it has also
revealed that some lenses don’t deliver
even illumination throughout the
frame or corner-to-corner sharpness.
Westfall: We’re working to optimize
quality with full-frame sensors. In the
past with film SLRs, things weren’t as
critical, but as we’re clearly seeing with
cameras such as the EOS 5D and 1DS
Mark II, they’re putting some high
demands on the performance of any
given lens. So we’re certainly looking at
ways of improving evenness of illumination
and corner sharpness.
PCPhoto: There are some remarkable
advances happening with optical
designs. What are some of the things
that you find especially interesting?
Westfall: There are several demonstrated
technologies. These are things
that are more than just theories as
many of these things have developed
into working prototypes. One of them
is liquid lenses.
Basically, there’s a combination of
water and oil. When electricity is
applied to certain parts of the container
that holds this liquid, the shape of the
droplet of liquid is made to act as a lens.
By changing the shape of the water, you
can use it as a lens to help make an
image. It has also been possible to make
multiple droplets work in conjunction
with each other and thus change the
apparent focal length of the lens.
PCPhoto: What advantage would
such a lens design provide?
Westfall: They’re relatively solid
state. There are no moving parts. There
are a lot of interesting ideas of how liquid
lenses can be made relatively less
expensively, but also be more robust
than a conventional lens. There are
many possibilities with this technology.
PCPhoto: Researchers at the
University of Colorado have invented a
technology called Wavefront Coding,
which holds the promise of dramatically
changing the way we take pictures.
What’s your understanding of it?
Westfall: It’s a technology that
allows you to choose the focus point
after the fact, after you’ve already
taken the picture. They produced a
working prototype that drastically
affects the depth of field. It offers the
potential to deliver much greater
depth of field without the need to stop
down the lens. This could improve the
overall clarity of many images. The resulting files are of
very low resolution, but the idea will extend in the future
to larger formats and higher resolution.
PCPhoto: One of the biggest concerns for photographers
has been battery life. What improvements do you
foresee on this front?
Westfall: Canon has already demonstrated our next
generation of technology, the hydrogen fuel cell. We
think that these are going to be valuable for a variety of
portable devices, whether it’s digital cameras, video cameras
or other things. We’re looking at performance levels as much
as 30% higher than current lithium-ion batteries of the same size.
PCPhoto: How are changes in the design of the image sensors
themselves expected to impact battery life?
Westfall: As we go forward, one of the things that’s going to
make a difference in respect to both power consumption and
image quality is the difference in the pitch of the wiring on the
chips. These are going to be reduced. That’s true for semiconductors
across the board. As the pitch of the wiring becomes smaller;
you get more capacity within the same amount of space. The other
thing that happens is that it requires less power to run and so it
becomes more efficient. For example, when we introduced our
DIGIC II technology, we offered a processor that was four times
more powerful, but used 35% less electricity than the original
DIGIC technology.
PCPhoto: There has been much discussion of OLED technology.
What will the benefit be for camera users?
Westfall: First, it’s important to understand how current displays
work, which is primarily an LCD with an LED backlight.
These are two separate components, which require the LED to
be on all the time, resulting in a high demand for power. In the
case of the OLED, the pixels themselves are the components
that actually emit the light. Because of that particular difference,
when you have a dark part of the picture, you’re not running
power to that portion of the display, making it more energyefficient.
The OLEDs we’re seeing are far brighter and display
much more accurate colors than LCDs. The future for this technology
looks very good.
PCPhoto: The brightness of clarity of OLED viewfinders may
offer the possibility that there will be a shift from traditional optical
viewfinders to high-resolution electronic viewfinders (EVF).
What would this mean for camera designs?
Westfall: If you substituted an optical viewfinder with an EVF,
the size, weight and cost of the camera would come down quite a
bit. You’d be eliminating the need for a prism and a mirror, which
currently limits how small of an SLR you can make.
PCPhoto: How would it change what the photographer sees
through the viewfinder?
Westfall: If you start looking at it from the standpoint of functionality,
you’d be able to superimpose a live histogram in the
viewfinder, which would allow photographers
to adjust their exposure more
easily on the fly. You could also zoom
into the image within the viewfinder to
confirm focus.
PCPhoto: Wireless technology is
rapidly finding its way into both consumer
and pro-end cameras. How
important will the ability to upload
images wirelessly become in the future?
Westfall: Wireless transmission will
become more standard across the board
with digital SLRs. Currently, one of the
obstacles has been the slow transmission
speeds. This starts to interfere with performance,
especially when you’re dealing
with higher-resolution images produced
from a digital SLR, which currently takes
pictures faster than they can be
uploaded. We anticipate that there will
be a big jump in wireless transmission
speeds, with wireless technologies such
as 802.11n promising 10 to 12 times
faster data transfer speeds than 802.11g.
PCPhoto: This wireless technology
affords the ability to quickly download
not only to one’s computer, but
to virtually any server connected to the
Web. This potentially holds the promise
of freeing photographers of the
limitations of the size or speed of their
memory cards. How do you see this
impacting photographers?
Westfall: This will definitely offer
increased storage for users. If it
becomes easier to save images to Web
servers directly from digital cameras via
wireless communication, I believe that
this technology will add an element of
reliability that’s missing from today’s
cameras. Also, more sophisticated
metadata stored with each image could
potentially make it easier to archive
images and search for individual files.
Why should photographers be limited
to the capacity of a memory card in
their cameras, when they have the ability
to be virtually anywhere and upload
images on the fly? PC
if it becomes easier to save
images to Web servers directly
from digital cameras via
wireless communication, i
believe that this technology
will add an element of
reliability that’s missing from
today’s cameras. Also, more
sophisticated metadata stored
with each image could
potentially make it easier
to archive images and search
for individual files.
While today’s discussion often
focuses on full-frame vs.
APS-sized sensors, future
sensors will offer far more than
higher resolution. In these
sensors, we’ll see greater
sensitivity to light, with ISO
equivalents of 6400 and even
higher, providing greater
flexibility than film ever could.
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