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.
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!
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.