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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
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.
Published in Nature's Nano journal: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n9/abs/nnano.2008.206.html
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