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A Brief History of Williard Boyle and George Smith, CCD Inventors and Nobel Winners
Nobel Prize In Physics Rewards Fiber Optics Expert, CCD Creators
Flash Memory Sensors: 100x Smaller Than CCDs, Better at Low Light
Canon Adopting dSLR Chips for a New Pro Camcorder?
What's the Difference Between CMOS and CCD? Giz Explained It
Digital Photos Act as Unique Fingerprints in Finding Criminals with Digital Cameras
Your Digital Camera Is Obsolete: Japanese Image Sensor 100x More Sensitive Than Current Chips
Toshiba IK-HD1 is World's Smallest HDTV Camera
Sony Using CMOS Camera For Cars, CMOS!
Olympus Shows off Snazzy 360 Cam and Projector

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squishyalt
10/13/09

In reply to A Brief History of Williard Boyle and George Smith, CCD Inventors and Nobel Winners
Wow. Dude, that's like way back when you had to actually DO SOMETHING to win a Nobel prize!

Good find!
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Coolmodo
10/13/09

@squishyalt: lol nice one
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krazydonutboy
10/12/09

In reply to A Brief History of Williard Boyle and George Smith, CCD Inventors and Nobel Winners
how did they take a picture of the first ccd?
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nukee
10/12/09

@krazydonutboy: Uh... film?
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Pope John Peeps II
10/12/09

@krazydonutboy: Why are you wasting your time here? You have a bright future writing dialogue for "Two and a half men", or "According to Jim".
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fleebailey33
10/12/09

In reply to A Brief History of Williard Boyle and George Smith, CCD Inventors and Nobel Winners
what would i do if i couldn't see sasha grey in 1080p?
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psychonaut2021:That's Mr Psychonaut to you!
10/12/09

In reply to A Brief History of Williard Boyle and George Smith, CCD Inventors and Nobel Winners
Long live porn, without it I have no reason to exist. Oh and thanks Williard and George.
Reply

izzledizzle28
10/12/09

In reply to Nobel Prize In Physics Rewards Fiber Optics Expert, CCD Creators
glad to see someone won a nobel award for real results and achievements...
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Jrsy Devil's Advocate®
10/11/09

In reply to Nobel Prize In Physics Rewards Fiber Optics Expert, CCD Creators

"It's a major award."
Reply

Kaiser-Machead
10/11/09

In reply to Nobel Prize In Physics Rewards Fiber Optics Expert, CCD Creators
Since the current Nobel Prize is gold-wrapped chocolate, they can just split it evenly.
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TheCrudMan
10/11/09

@Kaiser-Machead:
Are these teeth marks.
I thought it was chocolate.
It isn't!
Then why was it wrapped in foil?!
It was never wrapped in foil!
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Jrsy Devil's Advocate®
10/11/09

In reply to Nobel Prize In Physics Rewards Fiber Optics Expert, CCD Creators
Nobel Prizes were being handed out like candy this week.
Reply

puhsitch
10/11/09

@Jrsy Devil's Bright Idea®: Actually, few people know that the Peace Prize is, in fact, made of fine Swiss chocolate.
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jepzilla
10/12/09

@puhsitch: Why not? I'd kill for some good Swiss chocolate.
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dp
10/09/09

In reply to Flash Memory Sensors: 100x Smaller Than CCDs, Better at Low Light
All this talk of cramming pixels into a smaller sensor is useless unless the
lens technology can keep up. DSLR lenses are already reaching their limit. My hope is not about shrinking sensors and cramming pixels but for more optically clear lenses that are affordable. Optics aren't crystal clear. They distort, refract, separate light. A pocket cam will always shoot a softer image
than a DSLR, which will shoot softer than a medium format.

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Navin R Johnson
10/12/09

@dp: Agreed. Many people don't realize that the ability of a lens to resolve light onto a pixel is as important as having a lot of pixels.

I think we're soon going to reach a point where sensor resolutions are so high no one cares anymore and the optics will become the limiting factor.

Canon and Nikon better start working on cheaper better optics (if they are not already).
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adamrice
10/09/09

In reply to Flash Memory Sensors: 100x Smaller Than CCDs, Better at Low Light
Nice touch, showing that chip in front of a bit of core memory.
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ELPARTO
10/09/09

@adamrice: Is that REALLY core memory? I probably could've gone my whole life knowing what it was but not seeing it.
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fuchikoma
10/09/09

@ELPARTO: Yep, that's what it used to look like. You'd run a stong current one way to magnetize the toroids, and... I'd imagine it was by resistance that each one was read... I once saw a memory "core" from an old IBM mainframe that was about the size of a basketball!

So, I wonder what kind of service light a flash image sensor would have, or if the write cycles issue would even apply at all...
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LittleJon
10/09/09

In reply to Flash Memory Sensors: 100x Smaller Than CCDs, Better at Low Light
It's a zero-sum game. They're shrinking the pixels by 100x, but then their algorithm derives a single super-pixel gray level from 100 pixels.

They're also going to burn a lot of power in their back end processing in order to replace the ADC in conventional CMOS sensors. It's just not true that these burn a lot of power any more.

I strongly suspect that this approach will yield a significantly lower quantum efficiency (QE) than conventional approaches. QE is measure of how many of the photons hitting the sensor get converted in to an electrical signal.

A high QE with high noise is pretty useless, but modern, conventional CMOS sensors have a read noise of just a couple of electrons. That getting very close to high-end CCDs.

You just can't say that CMOS sensors perform poorly in low light anymore. Sure when you make the pixels very small like in cell phones, there's just not enough photons to get a good signal to noise ratio, but large pixel sensors are a different matter.

BTW, this isn't a new idea. People tried this with DRAMs as far back as the 70s.
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Benzido
10/08/09

In reply to Flash Memory Sensors: 100x Smaller Than CCDs, Better at Low Light
If they're up to 100x smaller, that should mean you can maintain pixel density and take 100 binary samples per pixel. Using microfilters, I guess you can change the colours and brightness of light that trigger those binary bits, so 100 binary samples per pixel should be roughly capable of producing four 24-bit colour samples.

The question is, how much noise is there, and if you average those 4 colour samples together, do you get a nice pixel with low enough noise?
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PorkchopFlavoredCupcake
10/08/09

In reply to Flash Memory Sensors: 100x Smaller Than CCDs, Better at Low Light
This was inevitable.
But I'm not sure this would be adopted by any of the major camera makers. They've all got their own R&D sectors that come up with some crazy advances we don't see for 10 years or so. I know Fuji does interesting work with sensor technology, as does Sigma-Foveon, Sony-Nikon and Canon. They've all made advances that should be even better than this, or at the very least complimentary to it.

Once they've accomplished condensing down the image sensor, the image processor, the memory, and the power source into one single chip, then that's when it gets wild.
Oh and btw, it's uncharacteristic of Canon to name their cameras with the D before the digit, that's what Nikon does (D80, D300, D3x, etc.) Canon was always (40D, 5D, 1D, etc.) Just clarifying.
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dingus
10/08/09

In reply to Flash Memory Sensors: 100x Smaller Than CCDs, Better at Low Light
I remember an old article by Steve Ciarcia where he took an off-the shelf DIP style DRAM (remember those?) that came in a lidded package and crammed it in a box with control electronics and an old SLR lens and made a 1-bit depth digital camera.
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LittleJon
03/30/09

In reply to Canon Adopting dSLR Chips for a New Pro Camcorder?
CMOS is necessary in order to achieve high MTF (resolution). CCDs just can't handle the data throughput required for full HD, and even using technologies like pixel-shift (where each sensor is offset by less than a pixel from each other) still results in a sub-par MTF for 1080p.

The use of CMOS in pro HD cameras is not new. Ikegami, a high-end Japanese broadcast camera manufacturer, has been using CMOS for their HD cameras for several years.

The newly announced <$10k Panasonic AG-HPX305 also uses three CMOS sensors (1/3-inch).

[proportal.system5.jp]
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Mark Wilson
03/30/09

@LittleJon: Interesting point on the resolution. We do reference the that CMOS is not totally new for medium-high end cameras, but it's a big, big deal for Canon to make the jump in this range.
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