Pellicle mirrors have been done before. I believe the most recent application was Olympus' E-10/E-20. The viewfinder was indeed a bit mediocre on that camera, but that's more the camera's fault overall than the pellicle mirror design. I believe pellicle mirrors only cost a little more than one stop of light to the viewfinder... not too noticeable in all but the worst light.
The advantage of a pellicle mirror, however, is great. No need for mirror actuation means you can use the viewfinder and sensor simultaneously. Being able to see through the viewfinder (and thus focus and meter, since the AF and meter sensors are in the viewfinder optical path) while shooting means you can fire at very high framing rates while retaining AF and metering, it removes vibration-causing mirror slap, and allows a movie mode.
Before any SLR photographers poo poo a movie mode, think about the possibilities. Imagine an SLR with a "record" button. Press it and you get a continuous 30fps frame rate at full resolution. Go back to your computer and you can either downsample this data to a video file, or pick any one of the 30fps frames as your photo.
How's that ring your bell for action photography? So long as you were recording and your AF doesn't screw up, you will never miss another shot. Bat on ball, race cars colliding, or kid blowing out candles... you simply choose the decisive moment back at your computer. It's a RED camera on steroids, or an Olympus E-100RS re-imagined with modern technology.
Storage requirements will be large, of course... even shooting JPEG, a present-day DSLR will put out at least 2MB files. That's 60MB/sec. 3.6GB per minute. Clearly we're a few years away from the high-speed 200GB memory cards we'll need to accomplish this task.
Only thing I'm scratching my head about is how someone could possibly get a patent for such an "invention". This guy didn't figure anything out. He simply described a well-known technology and pointed out a new use for it.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1, much like its Limited Edition sibling that we reviewed last month, is ever-so-slightly thinner than the iPad 2, a slate that most sane individuals (and competitors, for that matter) would confess is the market leader today.
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Pellicle mirrors have been done before. I believe the most recent application was Olympus' E-10/E-20. The viewfinder was indeed a bit mediocre on that camera, but that's more the camera's fault overall than the pellicle mirror design. I believe pellicle mirrors only cost a little more than one stop of light to the viewfinder... not too noticeable in all but the worst light.
The advantage of a pellicle mirror, however, is great. No need for mirror actuation means you can use the viewfinder and sensor simultaneously. Being able to see through the viewfinder (and thus focus and meter, since the AF and meter sensors are in the viewfinder optical path) while shooting means you can fire at very high framing rates while retaining AF and metering, it removes vibration-causing mirror slap, and allows a movie mode.
Before any SLR photographers poo poo a movie mode, think about the possibilities. Imagine an SLR with a "record" button. Press it and you get a continuous 30fps frame rate at full resolution. Go back to your computer and you can either downsample this data to a video file, or pick any one of the 30fps frames as your photo.
How's that ring your bell for action photography? So long as you were recording and your AF doesn't screw up, you will never miss another shot. Bat on ball, race cars colliding, or kid blowing out candles... you simply choose the decisive moment back at your computer. It's a RED camera on steroids, or an Olympus E-100RS re-imagined with modern technology.
Storage requirements will be large, of course... even shooting JPEG, a present-day DSLR will put out at least 2MB files. That's 60MB/sec. 3.6GB per minute. Clearly we're a few years away from the high-speed 200GB memory cards we'll need to accomplish this task.
Only thing I'm scratching my head about is how someone could possibly get a patent for such an "invention". This guy didn't figure anything out. He simply described a well-known technology and pointed out a new use for it.