Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidjohnstone | Hacker News Reader

For comparison, the Nikon D4 (a digital SLR) can shoot video at ISO 204,800, and it can resolve details in the dark beyond the ability of the eye, and I suspect this new sensor is more sensitive — or, at least, far more noise free — than that.

EDIT: Judging by some photos I've taken of the night sky, with an f/2.8 lens and with a shutter speed of 1/50s, you need an ISO of around 300,000 to get enough brightness.

If only Stanley Kubrick had this to play with. Instead, he used a f/0.7 lens to shoot some scenes in Barry Lyndon by candlelight, way back in 1975.

View on HN

If you are in Los Angeles, you can go to the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at LACMA and see the f/0.7 lens in person, right now. For that matter the entire exhibit is awesome.

Seconded

Didn't he use the same lenses used by NASA on the cameras for the Apollo missions? I think the larger aperture gave better low-light exposure during the candlelit scene (and may have inadvertantly fuelled conspiracy nuts that think the moon landings were a hoax because they think the sunlight reflected off the regolith was a secondary light source).

Yes, an f/0.7 aperture is a ridiculously wide aperture (thus, it lets in a lot of light[1]), two stops brighter than f/1.4 (a "stop" means a doubling of the amount of light; f/1.2 lenses are the fastest lenses commonly available, and they'll cost around $2k), or four stops faster than f/2.8 (which is what the fastest commonly available zoom lenses are, and they're expensive too). Leica make a very rare f/0.95 lens that would set you back $11k, and it's appropriately called Noctilux.

As for conspiracy theories, what makes it even better is that Stanley Kubrick also made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, which includes some scenes set on the moon, and I've heard of conspiracy theories about how these were used for the "real" moon landing too… (And yes, according to Wikipedia, Kubrick bought three of the ten copies of this lens made, with NASA buying six and Carl Zeiss keeping the other.)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-number

For smaller image circles (smaller sensor), you can get 0.95 lenses for under a thousand euros.

Holy cow! I just visited arethuza's Wikipedia link below...

I read the NASA trivia about the movie on a forum a few years back and it just popped into my memory. I had no idea these were incredibly rare. Yes, the irony him shooting 2001 wasn't lost on me.

Without reflections, space is pretty dark (excluding starlight) so I imagine the new Canon lense will see a lot of space use. Provided it can be made sufficienty RAD-hard.

>Without reflections, space is pretty dark (excluding starlight)

Lots of infrared too, though.

Distant from stars like our sun, the temperature of space is just 2.73 Kelvins. It's pretty easy to work out the temperature for any given location in space -- just add up the effect of any nearby stars, whose radiation decreases as the square of distance, and add the background temperature of space itself, caused by the Big Bang afterglow.

What this means is that, unless you're close to a star, it is very, very cold. Even at Pluto's relatively nearby location, the average temperature is only 33 Kelvins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_rad...

Voigtlander is making an 0.95 25mm m4/3 lens, and it's only $1100 or so.

I have one of these and they are quite popular amongst amateur videographers.

They definitely give a cinematic quality to captured video.

There's also a discontinued Canon f/1.0 that some rental places still have. I shot some stuff with it, and it's pretty amazing to play around with. Even with that though, we had to expose for at least 4 seconds at ISO 1600 to get legit star exposures. I've always fantasized about being able to shoot handheld video of the Milky Way, I'm happy to see that the technology now exists!

Any f-stop below 1.0 is pretty incredible. Kubrick filmed that scnee with JUST candle light.

As a 70s canon rangefinder nut, I feel it is my duty to point out that Zeiss was not the only one responsible for a 0.95 lens http://japancamerahunter.com/2012/01/the-incredible-canon-50...

Looks like that is true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7

The whole main reference for the article is worth reading

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm

and plenty of other fast lenses

http://www.taunusreiter.de/Cameras/Biotar_en.html

and here is a good summary of the developments that went into it (how hard would it be to find this page if not for a link on wiki?!)

http://web.archive.org/web/20090309005033/http://ogiroux.blo...

Fascinating. Looks like there were only 10 of those f/0.7 lenses made, 6 of which went to NASA to photograph the moon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7

The lens in the photo looks like a 50mm f/1.2 (I can't quite make it out in the vid), and I'd be very surprised if they weren't shooting wide open for this demo.

Why don't you post a D4 video at ISO 204,800, so we can all laugh at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com