Slashdot Mirror
Accident Could Lead To Better Digital Cameras
Dave Bullock (eecue) writes "Scientists at UCLA have accidentally created a material that will some day give us better, faster, cheaper, more flexible digital cameras. I toured their lab and shot a photo essay for Wired. Personally I'm looking forward to a quantum-dot embedded camera sensor someday soon. 'Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed. "The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.'"
...you'll see a niblet of it, dangled in front of you like a carrot, and then another niblet, and then another. Never will you get a product bringing out the "whoa, this is something totally new, and so much better thatn what we used to have!" in you - and it's just plain ol' business, as usual.
Seen any of those "whoa!" 3CCD consumer digicams on the market lately? ;)
Scientific accidents have brought some of the most groundbreaking discoveries - vulcanized rubber, X-rays, penicillin
I like how they compare 3 things that have been unimaginably advantageous to the human race to something that will allow me to view better-quality porn.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
but the assignment was to make a better solar cell. That's an 'F' for you, Chen!
I'm sorry to break the news, but just because you created something photo-conductive, even super-off-the-charts-photo-conductive doesn't mean it will become a digital camera sensor.
My question is, how is it that a UCLA grad student got a whole article out of bad research?
Even worse, the department will smile upon his non-work work because of the press generated more than anything else.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This is fairly old news. We've been seeing the same stuff in our lab for about 8 years (also came across it during Quantum Dot research). It's been very hard to characterize. Cool stuff. Since you have x, y, and z resolution when you're "writing" to the photosensitive material, and these spots can be diffraction limited in size, you can imagine the storage density of read-only optical media for this.
I couldn't find it in the archive because the search tool is down, but Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler once made the observation that great discoveries are less "Eureka!" and more "Hey, that's funny."
Congrats, but--"Pix, or it didn't happen!"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
1. Dup!
2. We've been doing that for YEARS...nothing special move along.
3. Duh...
4. Unless I invented it myself I don't believe it.
5. Dick Cheney will probably patent this and sit on it.
....it's a feature!
I dunno, it was also an accident, I was a bit drunk and started swinging random stuff around and like "holy hell, this could sell," and called up a marketing executive. She called me crazy, so I started a better company. I didn't actually do this, but I think the principle holds that drinking and silicon DO NOT MIX, and should never be anywhere remotely near each other under any circumstance, unless the silicon is mixed with an appropriate substrate to facilitate the absolution of grinprocessing, and an FPU to correct for the spins.
"But seriously dude, what is that in the radiator?"
Isn't that how all science is done right now ?
How many other "mistakes" like this have scientists just tossed out? Really sad considering how much money gets thrown into projects like these, only seeing it (sometimes) going to waste. But good to see this. One up for observant scientists!
were peer-reviewed and published where?
Given that some labs have already claimed that this is not a new phenomenon to them, it would be nice to see what is actually newsworthy about their "discovery"
"we are already at the point where it's the LENS that's the limiting factor for picture quality"
Not at all - 22mpix is about film resolution, which is just becoming widespread with the 5Dmk2 and D3X. Long way to go before that's on my phone. Similarly there's a long way to go with ISO. The 5Dmk2 has 25000 iso, but its still not perfect. Lots of room for improvement there and that's just two areas.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
I'm left with the impression that the author of the article is coming to conclusions about this materials success and marketability that are way above his pay grade.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Or is it just this particular approach that failed?
The nanoparticle boost to solar cell efficiency (by slicing photon energies to allow several electron-hole pairs per photon, rather than one, to be formed for photons with energies well above the band gap, and perhaps to additionally combine the undersized "slices" of the photon energies to use them as well) promised a big improvement: A cheap spray-on coating step that would improve the price/performance of photovoltaic panels to finally make them cost-competitive with grid power in suburban areas.
It would be a pity if that didn't work out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How fortunate to accidentaly learn a new word from a tag. Now just to make shure im not offtopic - I think this photosynthesis thing is cool, and we should try to find more of it.
Like the improbable drive inventor, I wish to accidentally create an accidentator, so that inventors around the world can accidentally something. Science will advance greatly.
Serendipity.
--- You can start modding this down .
PatRIOTically,
Kilgore Trout.
P.S.: Please enable Cyrillic fonts.
I accidentally dropped my camera and now it's broke you insensitive clod!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Published in Nature's Nano journal: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n9/abs/nnano.2008.206.html
-- sigs suck --
Chemical Engineers are fascinating to me. My wife is a ChemE, and got her PhD from one of the labs which did this work, but her specialization is cancer therapeutics and protein modification. To have that scientific breadth in the same lab seems crazy to me.
The actual paper can be found at Nature Nano, it's a few months old at this point. For all of you jealous researchers who claim to have already done this, it has all the usual citations. If you're lucky (and published), maybe you got one!
what a disturbing news, photo-conductivity has been known for ages, what is new here for a graduate student and wired to claim a new discovery!!! You can buy these devices at many surplus stores!!
shame on you
A physicist with 30 year experience
HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
UCLA SCIENTISTS ACCIDENTALLY CREATE AMAZING NEW CAMERA!
Some retard grad student fucked up his solar cell project and made something that has similar properties to part of a camera.
THIS IS THE HOT NEW SHIT.
UCLA HAS THE BEST SCIENTISTS.
GIVE US MONEY.
HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
Well, maybe -1, Flamebait times 5.
I have some karma to burn, and it's sometimes fun to tweak the $WHATEVER_GROUP of the day that pisses me off.
An accidental discovery is often great. I just hope nobody can get a patent for the discovery itself. Since it's an accident...
A higher quality sensor with less noisy gain will allow for better pictures with less light or smaller lens (or faster shutter speed with current lenses and lighting).
we are going to have super-sized 25 megabyte, poorly ...
I suspect with faster cpu's, and denser cheaper faster storage, and so much more data processing. Some of those issues just may be solved in software, and some seemingly minor discovery like this one may be the key.
IE in a few years the camera may be able to model every defect in crappy lenses simply by pointing it towards any reference landmark that a near perfect reference photo exists. Since software already exists to make bracketed photos, etc a fast enough camera that can vary enough parameters on it's own may be able to compare hundreds of varied focuses, lighting, etc in a mS, composing a nearly perfect photo every time, with little more than a cell phone footprint.
Of course if every photo was taken perfectly with a $2 camera, then it would likely ruin the art of photography, making only crappy photos stand out.
Your eye can see down to 6th Magnitude. How bright a star is needed before you can get away with a 1/20th second exposure? -4? That'll be 10,000 times less sensitive.
And that's with a lens diameter ~10-15mm, 4-9 times the light collecting power of the human eye.
"sensitive" my arse. It's sensitive compared to a highly insensitive emulsion.
110 posts and not one mentions that Chen is a smoking hot Asian chick:
http://164.67.192.163:81/faces/Hsiang-Yu%20Chen%20(Fishier).JPG
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/12/gallery_photodetector?slide=2&slideView=2