In a late-breaking(!) addition to his extended Camera Nitty Gritty series, Steve Litchfield looks at the EDoF cameras in some of Nokia's S60 smartphones, explains how the technology works and compares performance to traditional focussing units. With photographic examples, he shows how choosing EDoF for the upcoming E5 was a very smart move indeed for the (skill level of) target users.
Read on in the full article.
All that just went WAAAY over my head, but it was an interesting read anyway. I do have one question as a result of my read however and that is: How does an EDoF Camera affect things like the business card macro shots to convert to contacts?
@Abushaheed
The way I'm reading it is that an EDoF camera cannot take macro business cards - you need to hold them at around a metre away (which should be in focus), and then zoom/crop them down.. Not ideal..
Another area where EDoF doesn't work is for barcode scanning/shopping applications which work by recognising the barcode and then hunting the product code down on the internet for the cheapest price.
@JCB: Correct, such apps wouldn't work on EDoF cameras. Or at least would be severely limited!
to use the front facing camera .. not ideal .. but if you hold the card with one hand and press the take photo with the other .. uh wait .. well yeah .. its a pain!
The trick looks pretty nice to me. If I was to take shots with an EDoF camera and show them to a serious hobbyist or professional who's a stickler for things like how the colors turn out, would they fall into despair and prepare a hanging noose for both me and themselves?
I'll probably have to look back at the Camera Nitty Gritty articles and see what the little bit of skill needed with auto-focus cameras is, now that I've got one...
and you also took a picture of my cat.....or was that its twin?
Good read, always wondered why suddenly auto focus became a feature and wondering what the heck all non autofucus cameras did if they werent auto focusing.
although I feel Nokia just cheaped out and this is just the somewhat happy result.
Large depth field isn't that good. With a narrow depth of field you can bring the subject to attention easier, the background being blured. The attachment tells better than me what I'm refering to. The flowers were at only 10cm (around 4 inches) apart.
Also, the close-up pictures taken with large field depth lenses tend to be fatiguing. For landscapes it's a clear advantage, mostly for the point-and-shoot mode where you need to capture a moment. At least this is my opinion.
I agree with ratza, I'm not sure that wider depth of field is necessarily the way to go. Surely a large proportion of cameraphone pictures are of people, and having a sharp background can be distracting.
Interesting concept, though.
Can you take a picture of A4 paper full of text? I wonder whether EDOF can serve my needs. Thanks
Steve Lichfield looks at the EDoF cameras in some of Nokia's S60 smart phones...
DOF and Aperture are just proportional in terms of giving focus on the image. Extended DOF means that more of the image will be focus or deeper part of the image will be focus and in terms of Aperture Extended DOF means lower Aperture compare to fixed focus.
Advantage is that you will have a great chance to focus deeper part of the image whilst your fixed focus camera will only focus the farthest object it can reach on its lens. But I think both fixed and edof have still the same largest aperture size also on its shallowest dof.
Is it possible to turn of this approach/effect? Or would the camera not focus anywhere if one did? 😊
Well, there's a 'Landscape' option in the scene menu - but no, I think the EDoF optics/electronics are always active, by definition.
Losing out on the ability to take pictures of documents or business cards or QR codes is a massive failure on Nokia's part, especially considering Nokia brought attention to the world that phones could do these tasks.