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Film cameras. Dominated by ARRI, a 100 year-old company whose worth is ~250m. There were disruptions (red, sony, etc.), but they regained dominance rather quick

Film cameras. Dominated by ARRI, a 100 year-old company whose worth is ~250m. There were disruptions (red, sony, etc.), but they regained dominance rather quickly (one semi-metric is oscar nominees which cameras are used, as well as top 500 grossing films over a year). Similar stuff in the same industry with services and lenses with Panavision (rental only) and dollies (Chapman Leonard, also rental only).

jiggawatts 6y ago
Or even digital imaging, which is a new technology forced onto an otherwise very conservative industry. As an example, think of TSMC's upcoming 3nm process. It has a density of 300 million transistors per square millimetre. A Canon 5DS R has a 50 MPix resolution, which works out to about 60K photosites per square millimetre. That's a "budget" of 5,000 transistors per photosite! That's more than enough to do "digital sensing". That is: accumulating photons in a digital counter instead of using an analog capacitor, allowing unlimited dynamic range. There would be no such thing as sensor saturation, allowing unlimited "electronic ND filter" effects without the colors being distorted even in a long time-lapse. It would allow "steering" of the data to nearby accumulators through an on-chip network at megahertz rates, providing near-perfect digital shake reduction without having to physically move the chip. Shake reduction could track moving objects and avoid blur even for very long hand-held exposures with cars or people in the scene, the same as what the Google Pixel does, but at a far higher quality. The motion vectors could be fed into a video compression stage, improving picture quality to above what the compressors can normally achieve by "guessing" the motion from 24fps still frames. Etc, etc...
- tarlinian 6y ago
  What does this mean...you still need some sort of analog capacitor to collect photons and convert them to electrons.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    So instead of an ADC converting an analogue charge level to a 14-bit or 16-bit signal from a "big" capacitor, you instead have a tiny capacitor (or none at all) and collect individual 1-bit signals and accumulate them digitally. Photon counting, in essence.
    - fock 6y ago
      so what kind of collecting device do you propose then?
munificent 6y ago
I'm not sure what market you have in mind here. If you're talking about "the hardware used to shoot movies and TV shows", that disruption already happened with the move to digital. If you're talking about "cinematography using chemical film", it's not clear to me that there is much of a market for that. Film looks amazing, but it's a huge headache to work with and expensive to process. If it was what filmmakers wanted (where "want" takes cost into account), I don't think they would have abandoned it.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  There's a lot more to shooting movies than cameras. I have a client who has an interesting take on camera cranes. Unfortunately, COVID has pretty much shut down his market for now.

jiggawatts 6y ago

Or even digital imaging, which is a new technology forced onto an otherwise very conservative industry. As an example, think of TSMC's upcoming 3nm process. It has a density of 300 million transistors per square millimetre. A Canon 5DS R has a 50 MPix resolution, which works out to about 60K photosites per square millimetre. That's a "budget" of 5,000 transistors per photosite! That's more than enough to do "digital sensing". That is: accumulating photons in a digital counter instead of using an analog capacitor, allowing unlimited dynamic range. There would be no such thing as sensor saturation, allowing unlimited "electronic ND filter" effects without the colors being distorted even in a long time-lapse. It would allow "steering" of the data to nearby accumulators through an on-chip network at megahertz rates, providing near-perfect digital shake reduction without having to physically move the chip. Shake reduction could track moving objects and avoid blur even for very long hand-held exposures with cars or people in the scene, the same as what the Google Pixel does, but at a far higher quality. The motion vectors could be fed into a video compression stage, improving picture quality to above what the compressors can normally achieve by "guessing" the motion from 24fps still frames. Etc, etc...

tarlinian 6y ago
What does this mean...you still need some sort of analog capacitor to collect photons and convert them to electrons.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  So instead of an ADC converting an analogue charge level to a 14-bit or 16-bit signal from a "big" capacitor, you instead have a tiny capacitor (or none at all) and collect individual 1-bit signals and accumulate them digitally. Photon counting, in essence.
  - fock 6y ago
    so what kind of collecting device do you propose then?

munificent 6y ago

I'm not sure what market you have in mind here. If you're talking about "the hardware used to shoot movies and TV shows", that disruption already happened with the move to digital. If you're talking about "cinematography using chemical film", it's not clear to me that there is much of a market for that. Film looks amazing, but it's a huge headache to work with and expensive to process. If it was what filmmakers wanted (where "want" takes cost into account), I don't think they would have abandoned it.

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
There's a lot more to shooting movies than cameras. I have a client who has an interesting take on camera cranes. Unfortunately, COVID has pretty much shut down his market for now.