HardwareNoiseware Noise Reduction

Not all JPEG processing is created equal, but Noiseware can often fix what camera JPEG processing leaves undone....

One of the criteria that every camera review site uses in evaluating the quality of a new camera is image noise. As ISO increases noise normally increases as the sensor capture capabilities (or lack thereof) and boost processing electronics take their toll on the quality of the captured image. There are many things that affect that noise, not the least of which is the size of the light-gathering pixels that capture the image. As discussed in detail in The Digital Sensor and The Digital Sensor Part 2, the size of the photosite is the reason the tiny sensors used in pocket point and shoot cameras are so limited in capabilities compared to the Digital SLR, which is where the major growth in the photographic market is now occurring. The impact of photosite size is ably demonstrated in one of today's hottest DSLR cameras - the Nikon D3. This $5000 camera is a 12.2MP full-frame camera. Since it can also handle Nikon DX crop lenses and create a 5MP image at the common APS-C size seen in most of today's DSLR cameras, it is easy to understand that this 12MP full-frame has the same photosite size as a 5MP crop-sensor DSLR. As discussed in detail in the Digital Sensor articles, the sensor is an analog light-gathering device. It is not a simple digital on-or-off digital device where size really matters very little. In a camera sensor... [ Read more on www.anandtech.com ]

HardwareWindows Home Server: All Better, Only It’s 7 Months Later

If you recall my past blog post on Windows Home Server, we were discussing a critical file corruption bug in the operating system that Microsoft had finally identified. The Drive Extender technology for handling the WHS storage pool had a particularly nasty and hard to fix race condition that resulted in data corruption in certain situations when the...

HardwareHybrid Systems on Course to Speed Corporate Apps

IT executives in financial services, pharmaceutical manufacturing and some other industries are likely to evaluate complex -- and expensive -- hybrid hardware that runs specialized chips for performing complex calculations.