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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.'"
...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? ;)
Funny, though she was smart enough to not just toss the mistake away as worthless. That's the trick with accidental discoveries -- recognizing that the result is valuable even if it isn't the result you were looking for.
(And the lab is still working on better solar cells.)
You really need screen-sized pimples to get off?
The biggest problem with most digital cameras at this point is that they have tiny, low quality lenses pointed at tiny little sensors. The next problem is that the operator is incompetent (I take horrible pictures).
Instead of over-sized 5 megabyte, poorly framed, poorly lit snapshots that are the norm today, we are going to have super-sized 25 megabyte, poorly framed, poorly lit snapshots.
Hopefully the increase in speed is decent.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
But it might be good for that, or good for something else. If you don't fund her project *cough cough*, we'll never know.
My question is, how is it that a UCLA grad student got a whole article out of bad research?
She had novel results. That's plenty to get an article published. The journal doesn't care that it wasn't the purpose of the grant, they just care if the results are significant and novel. Unexpected results != bad research.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Isn't that just like slashdot?
Everybody's aiming for +5 Insightful but it's even better when you get +5 Funny!