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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.'"
Or, to quote Asimov:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new ...'
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Right here. Camera with Foveon X3 sensor
I think he means 3CCD dedicated still camera, not a 3CCD video camera that can do stills.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Not true at all. Sharpness of a given lens may be diffraction limited at a given aperture, but that doesn't mean better sensors are worthless! Light sensitivity and dynamic range are the true limiting factors for digital imaging. Any technology that increases either will move digital closer to film, which has been the goal all along.
"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.
Digital already surpasses film for light sensitivity, I can shoot from ISO-50 to ISO-3200 with my sub $500 DSLR. It will be quite grainy at ISO-3200 but so will film. As the examples at this site show modern digitals also have a greater dynamic range then typical films. Also the existence of HDR imaging shows that in practice you can achieve significantly higher dynamic range using digital techniques than you could with film.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ahhh. Well, if he wants to pay for it, it's technically feasible. Thing is, sensors are very expensive, the most expensive part of the camera. Add to that additional expense of the prism filtering, and there you have it. The 3CCD's are on video cameras because they're much lower resolution, cheaper sensors.
Go ahead and bitch, but 3CCD's are here. Just because they cost a lot doesn't mean that the tech isn't here. Hell... this development could even make 3CCD cameras more affordable to make.
Published in Nature's Nano journal: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n9/abs/nnano.2008.206.html
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