DSD is somewhat Ironic (What is DSD) because its process is quite literaly immitating the analog signal. But in audio, much to the contrary of video and imaging, this is the best thing to do.

In imaging however, the saying goes digital is better since it can describe every pixel in a lossless matter, which is good because this is how monitors work.

However, digital imaging is stuck to pixels. You can’t get more than what the pixel gives you with a pixel. With traditional films, you could rescan a film tape and get a greater amount of detail in it. A very direct impact of that is that traditional film cameras (the very expensive ones) are expected to be around 120 Mega Pixels, in theory, much higher than today’s best Digital SLRs.

While this theory is largely eliminated by the fact digital imaging never loses quality because you can’t degrade a bit of numeric information, it’s either a 1 or 0 and that’s where it ends, I came to the conclusion DSD could be applied to imaging, digitally, much the same way as it was for audio.

Think of it, the technology already exists. NTSC is transported over analog as a modulated signal on a 4.2 MHz bandwidth. Since this signal is essentially composed of waveforms, it could be digitally encoded in the same way as DSD: on a 1 bit high frequency stream using algorithms to describe its content. This could essentially describe visual content in a way that goes beyond pixels because it’s mathematically scalable functions stringed together.

But, this is a very “in the air” theory. Fixed images cannot be described on a lenght of time, so an image would have to be a peice of video. Editing such data digitally could prove immensily complex, the very reason why the best SACD discs are mastered from a PCM-based recording instead of a DSD stream. And as I am not scientific, there is probably a dozen of other holes in my theory, but hey, we can dream and you have to admit the idea is technically cool.