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Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the time before infrared cameras... Makes one think that now we can have cameras that can see as well in what appears darkness for humans.

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to get some feeling of it one can watch footage from Ukraine where drones with IR hunt soldiers at night. At the beginning of war, when soldiers didn't yet started to take it into account, there would even be whole groups walking like they would be at night feeling invisible, and that would be the last seconds before the explosion lights up the screen.

These days there is more experience with it, and for example to get "invisible" in IR one of the tricks used by the stormtroopers there is to put on an IR-protective coverall (it works to some extent and for short time) and to walk over warm asphalt.

In general even without IR the regular camera sensors these days are very sensitive, and you can pull a pretty good image out from the darkness by shifting dynamic range well down.

You don't even need to get so "fancy" [0] as IR cameras. "Nightvision" by way of light amplification has been around for ages. [1] Even the cheap stuff I played with decades ago lit up the night like nobody's business if there was even the smallest amount of moonlight. The downside was that bright lights made the image useless, but if you're building a robot, or running the video feed back to an operator you'd simply have another non-nightvision camera.

[0] Is it fancy if IR camera tech has been around since like the 1980's or 1970's?

[1] Since WWII if Wikipedia is to be believed.

Just an example of what a prosumer camera could do 12 years ago from a Sony A7s:

https://philipbloom.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SONY...

This camera is capable of iso 409,600, 4 stops higher than this image. I mean this is turning night into day.

We talk about video here with requirement to have as many FPS as possible, not static pics from camera with huge sensor and lenses, fixed on tripod like in your link. Try making a night video of the same scene with that same camera, it will be grainy useless crap that any newish cheap phone can triumph easily.

Actually most real cameras had/have subpar videos to normal phones. Small volumes so hard to develop good optimizations in small teams, sensors optimized to the max for still photos. That market is basically slowly dying (I stopped using my full frame too the day my S22 ultra phone came despite lower quality of photos, tried taking it on trips few times but it mostly stayed in the backpack).

Its better now regarding video quality, but if you say travel to exotic places, more than 95% of the folks have phone only. Even those with cameras rarely pull them out unless its proper photo safari.

It is probably pretty decent since these things are effectively video cameras to utilize the eletronic view finder. Probably not high framerate but its at sensor resolution and they let you pixel peep a live view image to confirm focus.

There's been some clips of Russian soldiers walking wearing either a space blanket or a sleepingbag to try and avoid IR. Unfortunately for them in those cases they were dealing with visual spectrum drones...

Not to forget WiFi positioning by fingerprinting your silhouette.

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