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As a person who makes money shooting video. I wish I had more reason to invest in my camera body. Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/dis

As a person who makes money shooting video. I wish I had more reason to invest in my camera body. Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements. You can always buy the fancy lens with perfect optics if you prefer that aesthetic. A professional camera software will always expose on/off switches for the correction so the photographer retains control over the shot. I really don't see the problem with giving pro cameras more optional smarts, it just makes them more versatile.

perardi 5y ago
Are you sure cameras don’t do that? I honestly do not know. They definitely do for still photos—Nikon has had chromatic aberration correction and lens distortion correction for quite a while, and it’s keyed to individual lenses. If they aren’t doing that in video, I suspect it’s a pure horsepower limitation. Reading the data off the sensor, and applying the corrections in real-time while writing to card may be too computationally intensive or bandwidth-limited.
- astrange 5y ago
  Sony cameras do this, yes. https://www.sony-mea.com/en/electronics/support/articles/00021599 https://www.sony-mea.com/en/electronics/support/articles/000...
orbital-decay 5y ago
>Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements. Pretty much this, and this is what some people already do with pancake lenses, correcting the result in post. However there's a problem with this: for the universal vendor-supplied profiles to work well, the lens must still be made within pretty tight tolerances, so the cost reduction is limited. And proper manual calibration is really expensive and tedious, which defeats the point. I don't know if there's a niche, but I'd love to see some startup doing the full-fledged lens and body calibration (STF/OTF and stuff) on demand to make high quality custom tailored profiles. That way you can use really cheap and compact lenses to get the same result; software correction can do wonders nowadays.
- kenneth 5y ago
  Software can't fix a slow aperture.
  - orbital-decay 5y ago
    Of course. But it can fix many artifacts like field non-uniformity and distortions (both spectral and spatial), which otherwise require more lens elements, precise production and exotic materials to fix. Software correction is typically slightly lossy, but it's a reasonable trade-off. Per-lens/per-body calibration extends this much more than it's currently possible with vendor-supplied profiles, but requires pretty complex and expensive gear.
  - astrange 5y ago
    It can if the scene is willing to sit still. You can get rid of shot noise by fusing different exposures.
rodgerd 5y ago
You've just described Olympus, and they mostly get shit for it. Apparently it's cheating or something.
- Wistar 5y ago
  Ignoring the computational parts, Olympus makes some spectacular optics but isn't recognized (much) for those, either.
- somebodythere 5y ago
  The Olympus cameras look sweet. Hadn't looked into them before. They seem a bit more stills-focused, but very nice.
kenneth 5y ago
Lightroom has profile for most lenses, and given it knows which was used from EXIF data, applying the correct correction is all automatic.
nkristoffersen 5y ago
Pretty sure camera lenses already contain a ton of information about distortion and chromatic abberation which the camera uses to compensate automatically. But this is generally disabled when shooting RAW.

perardi 5y ago

Are you sure cameras don’t do that? I honestly do not know. They definitely do for still photos—Nikon has had chromatic aberration correction and lens distortion correction for quite a while, and it’s keyed to individual lenses. If they aren’t doing that in video, I suspect it’s a pure horsepower limitation. Reading the data off the sensor, and applying the corrections in real-time while writing to card may be too computationally intensive or bandwidth-limited.

astrange 5y ago
Sony cameras do this, yes. https://www.sony-mea.com/en/electronics/support/articles/00021599 https://www.sony-mea.com/en/electronics/support/articles/000...

orbital-decay 5y ago

>Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements. Pretty much this, and this is what some people already do with pancake lenses, correcting the result in post. However there's a problem with this: for the universal vendor-supplied profiles to work well, the lens must still be made within pretty tight tolerances, so the cost reduction is limited. And proper manual calibration is really expensive and tedious, which defeats the point. I don't know if there's a niche, but I'd love to see some startup doing the full-fledged lens and body calibration (STF/OTF and stuff) on demand to make high quality custom tailored profiles. That way you can use really cheap and compact lenses to get the same result; software correction can do wonders nowadays.

kenneth 5y ago
Software can't fix a slow aperture.
- orbital-decay 5y ago
  Of course. But it can fix many artifacts like field non-uniformity and distortions (both spectral and spatial), which otherwise require more lens elements, precise production and exotic materials to fix. Software correction is typically slightly lossy, but it's a reasonable trade-off. Per-lens/per-body calibration extends this much more than it's currently possible with vendor-supplied profiles, but requires pretty complex and expensive gear.
- astrange 5y ago
  It can if the scene is willing to sit still. You can get rid of shot noise by fusing different exposures.

rodgerd 5y ago

You've just described Olympus, and they mostly get shit for it. Apparently it's cheating or something.

Wistar 5y ago
Ignoring the computational parts, Olympus makes some spectacular optics but isn't recognized (much) for those, either.
somebodythere 5y ago
The Olympus cameras look sweet. Hadn't looked into them before. They seem a bit more stills-focused, but very nice.

kenneth 5y ago

Lightroom has profile for most lenses, and given it knows which was used from EXIF data, applying the correct correction is all automatic.

nkristoffersen 5y ago

Pretty sure camera lenses already contain a ton of information about distortion and chromatic abberation which the camera uses to compensate automatically. But this is generally disabled when shooting RAW.