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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? ;)
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!
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.
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!
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?"
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.
I wish I had mod points. I also wish I had a few L-series Canon lenses (or even just one!). My camera body is WAY better than my lens budget allows.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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"
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.
Not only that but the article mentions the substance being flexible. If the technology is good enough it could be able to curve the sensor in the way that best overcomes the limitations of your cheap lens.
Nothing to see here
"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.
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.
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!
Well, try using those HDR photo techniques with a motion picture camera and let me know how that goes.
Most, I hope.
This mistake is useless, and nothing will come from it.
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!
Probably not what you meant but check out this work for some HDR videos (granted time lapse). Also I think Peter Jackson and company would argue that at the high end digital has plenty of dynamic range, and with camera's like the D90 and 5D Mark II it's actually coming to the prosumer market.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yeah, 2/3 rd's of my budget for the camera I bought with my rebate check was lense and I was still wishing for more glass when I went out to Yellowstone this fall. Decent quality 400+mm glass with autofocus and image stabilization is really freaking expensive. My 18-200VR lense was the best all around piece of glass I could afford and it's only OK quality.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
i just got a D300 - which has a detector very similar to the D90 that you mention. its low light performance is far less satisfactory than the ISO3200 film i used to use. while film does get grainy at high speeds, as you mention, the noise that these detectors (CCD and CMOS) is far uglier. in my experience, film is still superior at low light