Kodak’s sensitive sensors
Jun 14th 2007WallabyGeneral & eyes & nerd alert
One trouble with the Nikon CoolPix L12 that my sister got initially (see the last post) was that it was a little too quick to boost the CCD sensitivity to compensate for very low light. It only got into that mess because the lens is so small – I know, I know, you can’t put too big a lens on an ultra-compact camera without moving to Aberration City. I’d honestly rather see a camera that *doesn’t* use a huge number of megapixels, but *does* use the latest’n'greatest electronics otherwise. In other words, combine a good 3 MP sensor with the rest of the CoolPix. (Or better the Powershot SD line.) Would that really be so hard? Of course, nobody would buy it – “oh, this one’s only got 3 megapixels, it can’t be as good as this one over here with 12. Whatever a megapixel is.” But I digress.
Good news, had we waited only a few years for her first camera:
Kodak now says that it has found a way to make image sensors in digital cameras two to three times more sensitive to light and therefore capture more light in less time – which ultimately increases the shutter speed. The firm’s new sensor adds panchromatic, or “clear” pixels to the red, green, and blue elements that form the image sensor array today. According to Kodak, these panchromatic sensors are sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light and can collect a significantly higher proportion of available light.
from TG Daily
Sounds great! Except that… well… the “red, green, and blue elements that form the image sensor array today” are only “colored” because of a filter layer – silicon itself is already “sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light”, so it could “collect a significantly higher proportion of available light” were it not for the color mask that lets it produce color pictures. (Without that, we’d have ultra-crisp black and white.)
So the real innovation is not so much the development of more sensitive sensors – but rather, improved algorithms for combining white-light data with color-filtered data to generate “color pictures”.