ACE Camera Photography Magazine - Sound Vision CMOS-Pro Digital Camera

Mike Berceanu is a professional photographer
and our correspondent in Sydney, Australia.
He reports on the CMOS-Pro digital camera.

Sound Vision CMOS-Pro Camera

The Sound Vision CMOS-PRO camera shown here with the optional 12.5 mm f 1.3 lens.

Sound Vision, a relatively new American digital camera manufacturer, has produced a unique and inexpensive tethered studio camera based on a CMOS sensor, for the professional market.

the camera
At first glance, I’m sure the camera’s industrial look and lack of a conventional viewfinder may alarm many photographers, but it’s design owes nothing to fashion and everything to functionality. There is nothing unnecessary on this camera and it offers everything it should in an easy to understand and easy to use way. What’s more, the image files with their superb resolution for such a small sensor array, speak for themselves.

The Sound Vision CMOS-PRO has a niche in the marketplace all to its self. It’s the only professional use CMOS camera, but more importantly, the other tethered multi-shot digital cameras, albeit with larger CCD sensor arrays, are in a price range six or seven times more expensive. There is nothing that comes near it on a price per pixel basis, and this is crucial considering that reproduction at A5 size or smaller is what’s necessary for most commercial work, especially for catalogue production.

what is CMOS?

Apart from the lens, anything of interest on the camera is here on the left side. Two SCSI ports, one in and one out, a SCSI ID dial and termination switch for computer connection. Models for non-SCSI connection are also available. The 15 pin plug is for the Strobe sync. cable connection which is supplied. Six volt power goes into the round port, right bottom, and green LED on the left indicates power on / off.

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology is garnering much interest in the digital imaging industry. While Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) are still made with much the same technology that was around during their early development three decades ago, the rest of the semiconductor industry has moved on to newer fabrication techniques. Some 95% of semiconductor chips manufactured today are of the CMOS type. This in turn means that economies of scale, and the availability of facilities with more modern equipment that can be turned to CMOS sensor production, make the technology very attractive.

CMOS chips require less complex power supply and timing circuits. CMOS chips can be fabricated with some of the cameras functions including analogue to digital conversion (A/D), amplifiers and selection circuitry, on the sensor chip its self. It a sort of digital camera-on-a-chip!

Behind the C Mount lens is the CMOS sensor. The cyan colour is from the infrared filter permanently in place. The Colour wheel moves between the IR. filter and the sensor.

There are however some disadvantages with CMOS however. The stationary noise pattern is higher and because the light gathering area of each pixel is somewhat smaller and therefore gathers less photons, sensitivity is lower compared to CCDs of a similar size.

Several Japanese and USA chip manufacturers have announced and are producing CMOS chips in volume. It is certainly going to grow in importance.

C mount lenses
Quite sensibly, and unlike other professional digital cameras, the Sound Vision CMOS uses C Mount lens. Designed originally for 16 mm motion picture cameras and used also on Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) cameras, these lenses have much shorter focal length than 35 mm camera lenses, and are computed to cover smaller sensing areas such as that in the CMOS-PRO with an active sensing area of 10.8 mm x 8.64 mm. The big advantage of C Mount lenses is shorter focal length and therefore greater depth of field at a given aperture. If you are determined to fit 35 mm SLR lenses, this can be accomplished via a C mount to 35 mm lens adapter. Adapters for Microscopes are also available.

The kit we tested came complete with a standard 12.5 mm f 1.3 lens and a telephoto 50 mm f 1.3 lens, both of which were excellent optics. A four component extension tube set for close-up work was also included.

screen shot of Photoshop plug-in for previewing images

Photoshop Plug-In screen Preview mode. Composition and focusing are done here via video capture. The blue square in the middle shows the video zoom area for focusing.

one shot or three shot?
The camera comes in two basic configurations, the single shot and three shot models. The single shot version has a colour mosaic over the sensor array, allowing it to make complete colour images in one capture and is therefore suitable for moving subjects such as in portrait photography. Because of the small file size its use is somewhat limited to applications such as small print reproduction and illustrations for the internet.

Where the subjects are still, the three shot version is a much better choice producing a file three times bigger with no aliasing artefacts. This is the camera that we tested.

screen shot of Photoshop plug-in showing final image mode

Photoshop Plug-In screen Final Image mode. The Histogram is used for accurate exposure control. White, black and neutral grey levels can also be set.

amazing image quality
We had heard the image quality was good but were surprised at just how good it is.

Sound Vision's claims that it is suitable for publication sizes in the range of 5x7 to 8x10 to be printed at a 133 line screen are somewhat conservative. The three shot camera creates raw 2.7 megabyte colour images, which can be interpolated and sharpened using Sound Visions custom high resolution algorithms to create a working RGB file of 8.8 MB. The sensor resolution is nominally 1000 x 800, creating an actual original file resolution of 960 x 800 which is converted to 1920 x 1600 in high resolution export mode. Sound Vision engineers certainly know their stuff, and this is the output setting that I’d use for print production. If you are reducing file size for such uses as the World Wide Web, than the normal setting would suffice and involve less data overhead. The dynamic range of data capture is at 10 bits per pixel, and since each pixel senses in sequence for each R,G,B channel, there is some leeway in choosing the best 8 bits per channel for the job in 24 bit systems.

jpeg image shot with the CMOS-Pro camera

JPEG compressed version of an image made with the Sound Vision CMOS-PRO with studio flash. Click on the image for a larger version.

using the camera
The driver software is an Adobe Photoshop plug-in, accessed from the File > Import menu item. Composing and focusing are done via a live monochrome video feed from the camera. You move the camera and look at the screen. After getting used to this for a couple of minutes it feels quite natural. There is a video zoom setting for fine tuning the focus, assisted by software evaluating of edge contrast in a target area marked by a blue box. Camera shutter speeds range from 1 second to 1/1000th.

Once the composition and focus are finalised, it takes about 20 seconds for a three colour capture. If flash is being use, the software can autonomously move the filter wheel to the right position and fire the flash at the appropriate times. It’s a matter of sit back and watch. A monochrome picture which involves only one flash, takes approximately 4 seconds. When flash connection the shutter speed is automatically set at 1/30 second. A simple histogram allows powerful and accurate determination of exposure and colour reproduction. This method of image capture affords exquisite control because what you see is going to be exactly what you get.

When continuous light is being used instead of flash, the camera will maximise image quality by making several exposures for each colour if the light levels are too low for a quality 3 shot capture.

studio lighting setup for the digital camera

Set for the shrimp picture lit with 3000 watt second studio flash through two heads, one bare in background and the other through a half metre soft box. Shot with the 50 mm lens at f 11.

SV Micro
This camera is also sold as the SV Micro, for use with microscopes and in industrial applications. All that’s different is the driver software, and the differences are slight.

we'll be hearing more
We will be hearing more from Sound Vision Inc. though perhaps not always under their own brand name. Late last year Sound Vision formed an agreement with International Business Machines ( IBM ) to work on production-ready digital camera designs for various other manufacturers, utilising Sound Vision's new Clarity 2.0 digital imaging for camera functions, and IBM’s 1.3 and 2.0 million pixel Array CCD image sensors technology. Sound Vision also plan new CMOS cameras with larger sensors as they come into production.

Web site & contact
Sound Vision Incorporated
http://www.soundvisioninc.com/
and http://www.cmospro.com/cmospro.htm
take a look at the sample images

Australian Agent
SciTech Pty Ltd
155 Plenty Rd, Preston South
VIC, 3072, Australia
email: cons@scitech.com.au
telephone: 61 3 9480 4999

Mike Berceanu with Ayers Rock in the distance

Mike Berceanu is a commercial and advertising photographer living in Sydney, Australia. With more than 20 years behind the lens, he has spent the last five years passionately exploring digital imaging techniques. Using PhotoShop, Live Picture, MetaCreations Painter, and Kai's Power Tools Berceanu has become a master at creating seamless and captivating composite images. He writes for the Australian magazine Digital Camera. Berceanu's online presence includes stunning examples of his work and a library of articles and tutorials on imaging hardware, software, and techniques.