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Thread: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

  1. #11

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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    I have been following their development on the 4x5 and 8x10 sensor.

    There are a lot of bells and whistles like deep neural net software to add more resolution to the capture. High numbers of network connection for users, video capture, etc. As a professional sw engineer in ML and data intensive discipline, every one of these features require a lot of r&d resource and domain experts to deliver high quality product. I see that this company needs a hw engineer, embedded system engineer, UI software engineer, data processing engineer, etc. none of them comes cheap.

    I have my double that this is a well funded and well resourced company. If that’s the case, there are a lot of effort spent on non essential features to the large format folks.

    25k to spend on 6mp very large and ‘very clean’ pixels for 4x5. I see that the lower end hasselblad and p1 back being superior in both hardware and software offering.

    I am their ideal customer based but I don’t see unique upside of this product over the blad and p1..

    I hope they find an industrial application to keep funding this effort so I might eventually get a high MP 4x5 and 8x10 digital sensor system that doesn’t require a truck and dolly to haul around.

  2. #12
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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    Quote Originally Posted by wsit View Post
    I have my double that this is a well funded and well resourced company....
    From the "About" page:

    The smallest cameras are made by the biggest companies, and the biggest ones by the very smallest. Our research indicates that the market for large format digital cameras is tiny, so LargeSense needs to be tiny. If Canon and Nikon could be thought of as elephants, Phase One would be a kitten and LargeSense would be a ladybug (Coccinellidae).

    Our secret sauce is building and selling a specialty camera where the market is only a few cameras per year. It is not something that even a small medium format company could do profitably. Keeping costs low while building a revolutionary new camera is required.


    http://largesense.com/index.php/about12

  3. #13

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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    Quote Originally Posted by Oren Grad View Post
    From the "About" page:

    The smallest cameras are made by the biggest companies, and the biggest ones by the very smallest. Our research indicates that the market for large format digital cameras is tiny, so LargeSense needs to be tiny. If Canon and Nikon could be thought of as elephants, Phase One would be a kitten and LargeSense would be a ladybug (Coccinellidae).

    Our secret sauce is building and selling a specialty camera where the market is only a few cameras per year. It is not something that even a small medium format company could do profitably. Keeping costs low while building a revolutionary new camera is required.


    http://largesense.com/index.php/about12
    Right. Exactly my point. There can’t be that much money in this niche. Says they have 100 4x5 customer a year ( grossly over estimate imho), it’s only 2.5mil in sales. I have my further double you can find 100 new customer every year for this product. You can’t hire that many engineering talents with this sort of budget. I hope they can laser focus on what matters to this client base. Perhaps this existing client bases really want video feature, a auxiliary machine learning software, multi client network connectivity, etc. if not, I don’t want to invest in a piece of hardware where the company might go out of biz in a few years, with (assumed) closed source software that unlikely would work should the biz close.

    I hope this company has a long term sustainable biz model because I appreciate any new and precious resources dedicated to large format photography, and just don’t want this biz to fizzle out….

  4. #14

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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    I couldn't find out much about the detector technology. Is it CCD or CMOS? Or something else? The high frame rate for video suggests a CMOS-like technology to me, but I have not heard of anyone making such large-pixel large devices in CMOS. On the other hand I haven't really heard of anyone making such large devices as monolithic CCDs, either. I sort of favor "something else."

    Honestly what surprises me about the cost is that it's not 5 or more times higher. Unless there is a magic trick, this is absolutely enormous for a semiconductor device. I wonder if under the hood, it's some kind of mosaiced array. Or if it is fashioned from something like a digital radiography detector minus the X-ray sensitive part. I can't see how a semiconductor foundry would be able to develop and make a few devices a year without charging a million bucks per detector; it must be part of some larger run.

    I agree that neural net image processing sounds like an elaborate add-on, but it is possible, or likely, that post-processing is necessary to remove detector artifacts. Neural network, by itself, could mean any number of things. Large semiconductor detectors usually have artifacts and the number of flaws you can tolerate has a strong influence on the yield of a foundry run and hence the cost (eg "science grade" and "engineering grade" CCDs).

  5. #15
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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    A couple of articles with a few more technical and operational details:

    https://ymcinema.com/2021/07/06/meet...f-140mmx150mm/

    https://ymcinema.com/2021/07/09/ls45...w-and-pricing/

    Quote Originally Posted by reddesert View Post
    Honestly what surprises me about the cost is that it's not 5 or more times higher. Unless there is a magic trick, this is absolutely enormous for a semiconductor device. I wonder if under the hood, it's some kind of mosaiced array. Or if it is fashioned from something like a digital radiography detector minus the X-ray sensitive part. I can't see how a semiconductor foundry would be able to develop and make a few devices a year without charging a million bucks per detector; it must be part of some larger run.
    Good point.

    < scratching head >

  6. #16

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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    The reference to cinematography has me scratching my head.

  7. #17

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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    One of those YM Cinema links says it's a CMOS detector, although it's just tossed off and articles sometimes get details wrong.

    There are large CMOS detectors used for medical radiology and non-destructive testing, for example (just from googling) Hamamatsu makes a 120mm sq, 2.4x2.4K pixel, 50 micron sensor: https://www.hamamatsu.com/us/en/prod...ogy/index.html . And Teledyne DALSA makes a number of ~100 micron pixel sensors, and a 228x291mm, 4.6x5.8K pixel, 50 micron sensor: https://www.teledynedalsa.com/en/pro...os-large-area/ Someone in one of the old threads suggested Dalsa as a possible source.

    These X-ray sensors have an X-ray scintillator deposited directly on the surface of the CMOS detector, so it's not as simple as taking one off the assembly line, but it tells us that such a large CMOS detector can be built, and perhaps gives an idea of why it has pixels as large as 50 microns. I am sure that even with an existing detector, the engineering challenges in repurposing it for pictorial use are significant.

  8. #18
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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    A sensor originally targeted for clinical or industrial X-ray applications sounds entirely plausible. Something amusing about it, too - if silver halide film marketed for X-ray use can be repurposed for pictorial use, why not sensors?

    Dan, can you find a new digital camera these days that's *not* also specified for video use?

  9. #19

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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    "Digital" wins over "Analog" mostly because of convenience (or promises of elusive "savings").
    In this case the back adds inconvenience to already inconvenient large format setup and also, with its low resolution sensor, undermines the benefits of using large format gear compared to other smaller formats. Let's not dive into myths about magic qualities of "fat" pixels. If that was true then we won't move past Canon 1Ds circa 2002 in the full frame "digital" world.
    Do you see anything really appealing in this setup, other than the ability to project on the sensor through an "exotic" lens (and possibly brag about it) ?

  10. #20
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    Re: LargeSense LS45 now available for purchase

    I'm afraid I agree with Sergey on this. I'm not sure who the target market for this is. I do wish them well, though, and hope they succeed.
    “You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
    ― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know

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