EX-Z3
ƒ/3.5
10.2 mm
1/10
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be? Hint: You probably have one of these, but probably have not have seen it….
22 responses to “What’s That? (29)”
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Hi,
I don’t have a guess but two observations :
illustration
Probably LED lights, too sharp spectral distribution to be something else.Reflexions; on the illustration I made boxes a,b and c that seem to include the same pattern at different intensities, as those along the double arrows. Several glass (or anything else transparent) invisible on the photo?
In d, there is a clear overlap of green and red; movement ? If so probably patterns circulate.
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Oh, this one’s easy… it’s the screen panel of the M-5 Ultimate Computer, designed by Dr. Richard Daystrom.
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Rocketeer: wow. What a great cultural reference.
Bonjour OldCola! Your observations on periodicity are keen. And yes, there is glass and other transparent layers here.
There are no lasers or LEDs. The only illumination is from normal indoor lighting. I’ll add that hint to the intro above….
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I like OldCola’s last answer, but I’m going to specify that it’s a dual layer DVD.
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a very reasonable guess, but iv0 raises a good point…. Perhaps a very scratched disc could create the x,y grid periodicity we see here, but I have not ever seen something like this on a disc. With discs, I see various colorful radial reflections (from the circular pattern of the media).
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Bingo OldCola! In her icon, iv0 is holding her camera close by, so she was very close to the answer…. 😉
This is a close-up photo of the core of a digital camera that captures the image and converts it to electrical information. In other words, yes, it is the CCD Imager (seen in the bottom left of this earlier photo).
After removing the outer shell and protective nest of circuitry, I got to the embedded soul of the machine, an sparkling jewel that flashed colorful reflections more brightly than any gem stone. The overhead lights in the room created darting spears of striped light. Any slight tilt of the viewing angle would scatter the spears and send them flickering across the plain. It was difficult to capture the beauty with my camera since this 3.1 megapixel CCD was about ¼ inch square.
Here is a photo of the color filter array used on this Kodak 4800 camera.
You can see a diagram of the CCD Imager here, and the commentary:
“…CCD imagers can only sense the level/amount of light but not its colour. Coloured images can therefore only be created either by coating each pixel with a coloured filter (red, green or blue) and then interpolating the missing information…”Also, partial bingo to Andymill. On the other photo, he posted earlier: "Is this puzzle a picture of light passing through a prism from a camera?" It was decoupled from this thread, and pretty close, right out of the chute. I can’t tell if the colors here are RGB reflections from the color filters or perhaps some prism-like refraction (or grating diffraction) effects.
Anybody know CCD structures well?
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While you added your comment Steve I tried to recreate the light patterns 🙂
It is probably the CFA that separates clearly the basic colors. If you observe the RGB channels in Photoshop you will see that the three colors are quite "pure".
What was the ambiant light. An halogen lamp?In fact iv0 was much closer then I did.
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Oops. I thought it was a retro-style digital SLR. Also, it’s bizarre. iv0 got confused by an M6 and Rocketeer by an M5…. =)
OldCola: thanks for the spectral analysis! The lighting was plain-old overhead incandescent bulbs (but they are in metal cans, so they are like an array of spotlights). The image was a “found image” as I was disassembling the camera on a table (in other words, I did not expect to see this effect, and I did not set up the photo for special lighting).
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