Startup Claims 16.8M Pixel Camera Sensor

Reality Master 101 writes "ZDNet has an arti cle about a new start-up claiming they have a new CMOS-based sensor for digital cameras that produces 16.8 million pixels -- and cheaper than CCD, too. If you're like me and you've been disappointed with the performance of digital cameras compared to film, this sounds exciting! The only question is whether the color and shadow sensitivity will be as good as film, which has also been a limitation of digital cameras."

Comments

Re: Resolution - Nikon D1

[InitZero]

they don't take "standard" 35mm accessories... I'd love to see a company come out with a digital camera that could take some of the fancier lenses

Assuming I haven't been trolled, check out the Nikon D1. It does all of that you requested and feels like an F5. That it's only 2.74 megapixel is not really relevant to its target audience.

The newspaper I work for has all but stopped shooting film. As of more than a year ago, those folks in our remote offices stopped shooting film. Deadline sports and out-of-state assignments went digital shortly thereafter.

In the past couple months, we've bought two dozen D1s and should be all digital by the end of the year. If you live in a major market (over 500,000 people), chances are that most pictures in your newspaper were not shot on film.

I always hear that digital cameras don't have the resolution of quality of film. That is true and will be true for a long time (years if not another decade or so). Quality isn't always the deciding factor. For the news business, speed of turnaround is most important.

Any business in which the quality of the image is secondary to a need for quick turnaround and minimal cost (realtors, newspapers, insurance companies, etc.) will be digital this year if they aren't already. Further, catalogs and ads where the image quality is greatly important but the iamge size is small, will be digital.

InitZero

16Mpix is finally better than scanning 35mm film

[TheGratefulNet]

its well accepted that scanning 35mm negatives or slides is about 10megapixels in resolution.

you can buy film scanners (2700dpi) for under $500. and regular 35mm film cameras for much less.

it takes about 20minutes to develop (process) 35mm negs. these can be done at any local corner drugstore these days - typical cost is $2.50 for a roll of 36 negs.

when trying to decide if I should go all-digital, I compared the resolutions of digital and film/scanned and film/scanned still won. the only disadvantages are:

- you have to drive down to the drug store and wait 20mins to an hour for processing.

- negs still accumulate dust, scratches and fingerprints. especially at those drug store places, which usually employ folks who aren't as sensitive to your negs as you'd like them to be [grrr!]

otoh, as scanning gets better and better (like drum scanning), you can rescan your negs as the tech. improves. with digital shots, that's it - you're stuck with the current tech an no amount of postprocessing will create extra resolution. unlike film that does store more resolution than current scanners can extract.

so for me, its a no-brainer. I'm still using film and scanners to get .jpg shots out of my stills.

--

Re:Scary

[sharifi]

oops, I hit "submit" instead of "preview". Here is my post correctly formatted.

What are the chances of ONE of those going dead, like in a laptop screen? More importantly, what's the return policy on dead-pixels in a camera?

It is extremely rare for a CCD-based (or CMOS-based) digital camera to have no bad pixels. Most (if not all) digital cameras automatically cover the dead pixels through interpolation. And with 1.2 to 3.4 million pixels per image, you probably won't notice if a a small number of pixels are interpolated. If you wanted to purchase a 1 megapixel CCD with no bad pixels, expect to pay around $25,000. Nasa is developing a new type of CMOS based sensor, called APS (Active Pixel Sensor). Among other goals, it aims to increase the yield of perfect samples. See this page for more information.

Achieving Parity With CCDs? Not quite...

[bughunter]

The article implies that pixel count is the only area where CMOS imagers (specifically, CMOS Active Pixel Sensors) performance does not compare well with CCDs. In truth, the CCD still has a number of advantages over CMOS:

- Signal to Noise Ratio: The CMOS APS suffers from inferior SNR due to the fact that it must use a surface channel FET to "read out" the individual pixel. CCDs use only buried channels to transfer charge to the readout amp. One company (name fails me) has developed a CMOS "Active Column Sensor" that offers better SNR, but still not as good as a CCD. This property is very important for getting a good contrast in images that have both light and dark areas.

- Fill Factor: The photosensitive area of CCDs can cover 100% of the silicon, whereas in CMOS APS devices, some area of each pixel must be devoted to switching elements, resulting in less than a 100% fill factor.

- Pixel Size: This is related to fill factor. Since the switches can only get so small, the smaller your pixel size, the worse your fill factor. Thus, to maintain a reasonable fill factor (>50%), CMOS pixels have larger minimum pixel size than CCDs, about 18 microns, whereas CCDs are now sold with pixels as small as 6 microns.

- Modulation Transfer Function (MTF): This is a subtle concept, but anyone familiar with electronic filter design can relate to it - it's the transfer function of signal strength as a function of spatial frequency. In layman's terms, it's the ability of a camera to preserve the contrast in regular patterns (like stripes or arrays) imaged by the system. Fill factor comes into play again here - focal planes with less than 100% fill factors introduce aliasing into the MTF, amplifying weirdnesses like what happens when the sportscaster wears a plaid jacket...

Finally, there are some things that people don't take into account when they compare electronic sensors and film:

- Film has a logarithmic response to exposure to light. CCDs and CMOS have a linear response. Therefore, the electronic devices will never be able to match the dynamic range of film, or at least not with a generous dose of innovation. This is very apparent when you light a scene for film, and then light another for video. Professional video cameras use a few tricks to approximate a log response, but the result is far less than perfect.

- A close friend and colleague of mine worked on developing a 12 megapixel CCD intended for use in Cinematic cameras, going so far as fabricating and testing the device. When my friend's company showed the CCD to Dreamworks, the digital cinema folks weren't interested: they had determined that the needed resolution for acceptable cinema was only about 1280x1024 (I know the aspect ratio is wrong, but this is the example they gave). Thus, they weren't at all interested in a 3k x 4k CCD.

Counterintuitive, yes! But it becomes believeable when you remember the descriptions about how flaws and "noise" had to be added after early digital cinema trials resluted in audience dissatifaction about how the image looked too "perfect" or "fake."

One more thing of note: For the past couple of years, Sarnoff Labs and MIT Lincoln Labs have been working on CCDs built using CMOS foundries. MIT uses a SOI process that is very promising, and Sarnoff just uses a big giant P-well to build its CCD in. With these kind of devices, you can achieve same high levels of integration as a CMOS APS and still get the performance of CCDs. The only element that does not improve much is power. CCDs will always require a lot more power than CMOS APSes.

Carver Mead

[plastik55]

For those fo you that don't know, Carver Mead is the scientist who constructed a "silicon retina" (a light-sensing chip that mimics the topology and information processing techniques of the retina.)

This appears to be an outgrowth of that work, using the analog VLSI techniques that were invinted for the retina project.

Look at the size of it!

[LSD-OBS]

16.8 million pixels...let's see...3 bytes minimum for truecolor:
16777216 * 3 = 50331648 = 48MB

Now that's a lot of data to be transferring around. I assume that any devices using this new technology will at least be transferring the photo data using USB or something...

BTW 16.8 megapixels is most-likely a 4096x4096 image. WOW! You could zoom in over 5x before getting a pixel ratio of 1:1 with the image on an 800x600 display.

Hmmm imagine a beowu$%^#5...NO CARRIER