How To Fail At Media Handouts

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab announced this week that they have developed an imaging system capable of capturing half a trillion pictures per second.

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second.

An easier-to-understand article in the New York Times:

To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second . . . If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion . . . the resulting movie would last three years.

To promote this groundbreaking achievement, MIT made available media handouts. However, a closer look at the handouts reveals several issues. One link to a photo is broken due to faulty page coding, while the other two images are nearly unusable.

The four-person photo is blurry, poorly exposed, and suffers from bad colour and composition. The two-person image, though slightly salvageable with some editing, is also out of focus and poorly lit. Neither photo includes any IPTC metadata, which is a mandatory requirement for media handout images.

On MIT’s own news page, a photo shows one of the lead researchers with a metal pole right next to their face while they examine a glowing soda bottle.

A huge institution like MIT couldn’t be bothered to get it right the first time. Too bad it doesn’t do any research into public relations photography.

Another university, another camera

Added April 28, 2017: A new “world’s fastest camera” has been developed at Sweden’s Lund University. It claims their camera does the equivalent of five trillion pictures per second. The press release has better photos than MIT because the Swedish university hired a professional photographer.

But sadly, Lund University didn’t hire a professional PR person. There are repeated errors throughout the press release which shows that either the PR person didn’t understand what they wrote about or they’re stuck back in the 20th century.

Did the university, as its press release claims, actually invent the “world’s fastest film camera”? Did the university researchers really use their “super-fast film camera” to expose various processes “on film”? If so, why does the technical paper never mention the word “film” and instead only talk about camera chips, imaging sensors and pixels?