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New Sensor Has Real Per-Pixel RGB Sensitivity
jonr writes: "Well, the holy grail of digital photography is finally found. A company named Foveon have developed a sensor that captures RGB colours on each pixel. So what you say? Well, for the past 30 years (or since the CCD was invented) we have been using CCD with with red, green & blue sensors (or cyan/magneta/yellow) and then used software to figure out the real colour. But Foveon is the first company to deliver RGB-in-each-pixel sensor.
For those of you who are not into digital imaging, this makes a lot of difference, it's would be just as revelutionary if somebody would make a flatscreen with a real colour pixels, instead of the RGB dots. dpreview.com has the scoop.
(No, it won't mean the death of film, but I suspect we'll see dramatic improvement in quality)."
You spend $3,000 on that Sony MiniDV camera with 3CCDs and it's quickly outdated.
No matter how many time I tell myself I'm over the fact that this will alway happen (stuff being outdated right after you buy it), the first thing that pops into my mind is "damn, if only I could have waited a little longer..."
Actually, this is very cool. Combine it with the depth capturing story we heard about earlier and hopefully dept projection and the future looks really really awesome!
So when a digital camera is said to have 3 mega-pixels, does that mean that it only has 1 million pixels for each color??? Thus, the actual resolution isn't 3 mega but 1 mega???
More resolution, while nice, is not what digital photography primarily lacks. Light and shadow sensitivity is what really sucks with digital cameras. Film has a logarithmic sensitivity to light, while a digital sensor has a linear sensitivity.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of any technologies in development to give better light/shadow sensitivity.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Personally, this is major droll material for me. I hope this technology comes to the consumer level by the time i'm ready to dish out money for another digital...
According to this article it says the first camera with this new sensor will be Sigma's SD9 SLR digital camera. No details on when, how much, what features. Anyone have more info on when this will be available? domo
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
High-end digital imaging devices (mostly digital and analog video cameras, but perhaps some still cameras) have been using 3 CCD chips for a long time to achieve RGB values for each pixel. It's usually done with a prism system that splits the incoming light into different colors which then are registered on different CCD chips.
In 1-chip devices, color is acheived through a matrix of filters which covers the CCD chip, allowing only certain wavelengths of light to reach each pixel on the CCD.
It seems to me that what this will really do is give us smaller, higher quality imaging devices. Let's hope X10 doesn't launch a while new popunder campaign...
Sorta... but now there are 3 full arrays to capture each color. Meaning it doesn't have to just downsample the color separation... It gives accurate color representation "in software".
A 400% increase in the amount of red and blue light accounted for and a 200% increase in the amount of green. (See figure 1.) A mean increase of 300%, but the overall image quality will be exponentially better because the true color balance will be maintained.
This is freakin' awesome, btw.
Guvegrra?
If anyone is interested how photography resolution compares to digital, I found a great link once about this: http://www.users.qwest.net/~rnclark/scandetail.htm
It's pretty eye-opening if you think digital photography is getting close to film.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There's also a decent article on business2.com
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/print/0,165
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Please check out superconducting tunnel junction technology, which is the basis for detectors that can measure the frequency of impinging photons. No need for separate RGB pixels - stacked or not - because each pixel can determine the exact frequency or wavelength of each photon it detects. You can take a spectrum and create an image in one exposure with one detector, without using any diffraction gratings or RGB filters.
Edith Keeler Must Die
There are already some (very high-end) digital cameras using CMOS technology, and judging on the sample images I've seen, they are awesome. Take a look at the review of Canon's EOS-D30, for example.
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
Due to the sensor thickness, is depth of field going to be restricted to smaller stops in order to have the entire thickness of the sensor in focus?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
This is very cool technology. So cool that the photodetector array must be cooled to "well below 1 degree Kelvin" in order to operate. This requires a liquid helium cryostat. So don't expect this to appear in pocket sized cameras any time soon. But it sounds great for astronomy.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
WOW. I worked on a project trying to do some pretty accurate work with digital cameras, and I can tell you this... Until you spend around $20,000US, you will not even get close to your original. Heres an example.
The subject is a GretagMacbeth color checker (a bunch of square swatches of color with a black boarder)
With a pro-sumer camera, say around 3k, the image overall looks OK, but zoom in to any "grayscale" swatch, and you'll see that the image is still very much little RGB dots blurred together, and your grey never has all the same RGB vales as a true grey should.
As you go up to the 20k price range, a variety of tech is used to get more accurate color. The best I have seen was a back for a large format camera (can't remember the name for the life of me) that, when used in a studio setting only, could capture exact grey values for each pixel. What this means, is that if you took the captured image in to Photoshop, with no image correction, and you used the eyedropper over a grey swatch, your RGB values would read (x , x , x) over the whole swatch without a hiccup (1 pixel sample).
The camera achieved this by physically moving the CCD array so that it took something like 3 or 4 shots of the image (hence needing to be in a studio set up).
Now, a single CCD camera setup that can be used in the field, probably generating the same results as above, is going to be HUGE.
I don't know the target price range to start, but cameras using this tech, if it lives up to its promises will be HUGE in the pro photo field. Capturing a more true color vs. totally interpolated has enormous impact on color correction and manipulation images. In my experience, images for lower end cameras don't always manipulate in ways you expect because of the interpolated nature.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
This thing could also make one heck of a nice nightvision system, if used properly... so we could all have nice color pictures at night, just like the military folks have had for a long time. (Green screens are just for the media to consume).
--Mike--
...and I think the death of film may really just be around the corner.
Not so fast, though...IIRC, the upper limit right now is something like 6 megapixels, for a ludicrously expensive unit. 6 megapixels scales to roughly the granularity of 200 ASA film - fine for everyday photography, not so fine when you want to blow up images to ludicrous sizes. People who like to make poster-size prints will continue using ASA 40 and 50 film with cameras that cost a fraction of what one of these digital-wonders cost, with film that gives them not only better resolution, but superior color balance as well.
Seems like every time there's an advance in digital imaging, somebody has to whang the "death of film" gong - the fact of the matter is, even _after_ digital cameras have surpassed analog ones, there will be people who will _still_ prefer film, if for no other reason than they like the images better. You can't measure artistic value with "real color, nn megapixel" stats - and as such, film will really never die.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
If I'm right in my assumption, it should be possible to build an arbitrary stack of layers (with reduced efficiency) for any color ranges you care to deal with. It might be possible to make a camera that has a special layer to pick up the 700nm wavelength that chlorophyll absorbs line to determine plant health for use in agriculture.
I suppose it could be stacked the other way, but that would probably be a much larger engineering challenge.
--Mike--
$1K for a digital SLR camera? More like $5K.
I don't have any idea why digital cameras that'll take my Nikon lenses are so ridiculously expensive. The reason I haven't bought a digital camera yet is that I can't stand the idea of spending more money on a camera which has the optics of a cheap compact camera than I did on my SLR camera. That and the very noticable artifacts present in most digital photographs (and the lack of being able to do things like leave the shutter open for long exposure shots).
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It's not just the resolution - it'll do away with the awful artifacts that are present on even the best of today's digital cameras.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
All the 5Mpixel stuff on the market, like the CoolPix 5000 mean 5 million sensors, not 5 million of each sensor. Really. Go check some of the spec pages on dpreview if you don't believe me.
It makes a lot less difference then you would think, but it does make some difference.
There are a couple of problems with logarithmic sensitivities in electronics- the little potential wells fill up too quickly. Make them too deep and they lose the low level light, make them too shallow and the electrons spill out.
Conventional AgX can capture around 14 stops of light (thats 2^14) - conventional paper can handle 8 stops or so... a typical scene has 2^11, give or take. Depends on the scene and the subject- obviously a shot of a barn with the door open in broad daylight is going to have a bit more range than a shot inside in a white room with light bouncing everywhere.
So, what you really want, is to have the SOFTWARE be cognizant of higher bitdepth images. When you have 8 bits to capture a 10 bit scene, information is lost. So you throw some out... and you end up with muddled highlights and muddled shadows, and something in the middle that looks decent.
Believe it or not, but alot of companies have spent alot of money trying to figure out the correct 'mental' representation of a greyscale- not even including colour. I'm partial to Kodak (I work there, but these views are mine).
I've worked with extended bit depth images quite a bit and know that there is none (read, big fat ZERO) ms support for anything over 8 bits.... in fact, ImageViewer simply locks up and crashes. So any sort of solution that gives you extended tonal rendering are going to have to be custom solutions... and that probably won't sit well with the average person- "what do you mean i have to process my pictures before I can view them?!?!? I'll just go buy another camera" etc etc. Even if the benefits are enormous, there is the simplicity factor that drives it.
I personally am interested in this sensor, but there seems to be the wrong website linked... which worries me...
hmm well yes, can't argue with that
I have been involved in direct action to try and highlight the horrors of 3rd world debt resulting in some tokenism from our government.
I am appalled that Western consumerism drives such business models. Almost everything in this room is an imported good manufactured outside my native country.
I try and buy as much of my food as possible from local producers.
So you've got your own electronics manufacturing plant there then I guess. The computer is one you built by hand from locally sourced components I suppose. I'm impressed at your resourcefulness.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Back in the late 1970s Carver Mead of CalTech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC computerized the design of integrated circuit chips. Before them chips were designed by mechanical drawing and hand-taped photo-masks. This often resulted in spaghetti-looking chip circuits. Mead & Conway reduced chip design to a hierachical set of physics and geometry issues, and wrote a compiler to issue these from higher level descriptions. Chip design was then transformed more-or-less into a computer language. People then added optimization and simulation-testing tools to further automate the process. It got so simple that chip design labs were offered in engineering colleges with same-semester turn-around. Some guy in my class twenty years ago designed a "homogeneous coordinate multiplier" which become the geometry engine of a startup called Silicon Graphics.
Yes and no. Lower priced scanners have CCD sensors, one for each color component. This development will put drum scanner quality (think prices greater than $10,000) into scanners at much lower prices (less than $5,000 and dropping as innovation continues). Many current CCD image scanners often use separate CCD's and color filters to first scan each color channel, and then reassemble the composite image in software. This innovation will hopefully lead to much better color balancing as well as higher resolution.
vegan lifestyle : There isn't one really. It's a series of ongoing choices made by the individual. Vegan is just a quick label to tell/warn other people.
:)
As for the deer, they got along just fine for millions of years before people shot them. Looks like the shooters killed all the predators. What a mess! A difficult situation, my in the field decision would probably be different from the one I'm about to type. The population means nothing. Shooting an individual means everything to that individual. Deer, like most animals, self regulate their populations to food supply. Weak animals can't breed. The population will find a sustainable level given enough time.
Solution, do nothing. Except maybe take some food down once in a while.
Is it better to let nature take its course even if that's bad for the animals?
"the animals" don't exist. Individuals do. Nature will take it's course no matter what we do.
Can humans and their tools ever be seen as part of nature?
They already are, humans seem to think that they aren't animals. The tools at our disposal means we can produce more food with less animal products. You may have gathered it's the suffereing at the individual level that I feel is important. That may not be true of other vegans.
Is there ever a time when a human can kill an animal and not be "exploiting" it?
I try to think without the distinction between species. So replace the word animal with the word human and see how you feel about that. That's generally how I feel.
Is it acceptable to "exploit" an individual animal for the benefit of the group?
An eternal philisophical question. Humans often sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. My existence is exploited every day by those that have power over my life. Everywhere I turn profit is deemed king over people. Power & wealth isn't distributed anywhere near fairly.
If you stop considering animals and people distinct then your own values about fairness and cooperation can be applied.
Just because a cow can't talk doesn't mean it has no emotions. It's such biological arrogance to consider NO OTHER BEING except once branch of hairless monkeys sentient.
It's simple to see that a dog will feel hungry or cold. So why not lonely or happy?
I've worked on farms and been involved in the "animal rights" movement. I used to eat meat. I used to shoot rabbits and birds. I've seen first hand the disdain people have for the creatures around them. It's not difficult to witness the many terrible ways humans treat each other.
Here I am in my safe comfortable surroundings. I have no need to eat cows so why make them die for me? Mass murderers of humans are generally reviled and yet we kill millions and millions of cows, pigs & chickens. It's so wrong.
There's no real reason I shouldn't shoot you in the face and eat your tasty flesh. Out of courtesy, I choose not to and I extend that courtesy to other species. If it came down to it though and I wasn't feeling noble you might find yourself on the barby (unless you got me first of course
Carrion - nope, no reason why not (except digestion problems)
thanks for your curiosity, much better than the usual hostility people give me just for being nice!
It's all quite irrational but I have the luxury of choice and this is the choice I've made.
Incedentally and quite ironically I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease a couple of years ago. Recent research has made strong links between the consumption of cows milk and the onset of the disease. Just my luck eh! The cows got me.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Format is not function.
If you don't understand the difference between colour space and format of the data, you really don't need to post a response to either this or the previously mentioned topic. Because you don't understand it, may I reccommend a book, Digital Encoding Solutions, available from Amazon for around $45.
Using CMOS sensors, it is possible to get both linear and logarithmic responses from pixels, depending on your biasing conditions.
For a linear sensor, the photosite is generally a floating N+ diffusion, that makes up one side of an NMOS transistor. At reset, the voltage here is set to VDD. As incident light generates electron-hole pairs, the electrons are collected in the diffusion, lowering the voltage in a linear fashion, dependent upon the parasitic capacitance of the photosite. When the integration time is up, this charge/voltage is sampled, and you have a linear sensor.
For logarithmic response, the reset level of the photosite is actually even with the biasing of the gate to that transistor (minus the Vt, of course). Incident light generates electrons, and the transistor operates in the sub-threshold region, making the voltage at the photosite vary as the logarithm of the current being generated and flowing through the gate region. Sample that voltage, and tah-dah, you've got a logarithmic response to light.
I admit, this is much easier to understand with diagrams of the diffusions, so if you want, here is a pdf of a paper discussing a sensor that has combined linear-logarithmic response:
CMOS Active Pixel Sensor With Combined Linear and Logarithmic Mode Operation
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