New full color image sensor developed

[piaxVirus]

I sure hope we see some products, that use this technology, come out in the next year. Check out the image comparisons. They made me drool.

http://www.foveon.net/X3_tech.html

http://www.foveon.net/press_X3_business.html

[paulw]

ABC News last nite had a small piece on this. The comparison that they showed with 35mm film looks promising.

[Dr Mordrid]

This is going to make high end cams VERY cheap. As it is now to get this kind of quality you need 3 CCD's, one for each primary color. This will make single CCD cams every bit as good, if not better.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Call me a doubting Thomas, if you will, but I wouldn't get too excited, yet. The colour separation is achieved by the thickness of the layers (cf a thin gold layer on glass appears blue by transmitted light). This means that the no. of molecules in each layer thickness must be precisely controlled, no mean feat. Also, the surface layer must absorb only blue and transmit green and red, with longer wavelengths, but not transmit a signal generated by them.

It would not surprise me too much if this technique were one of those that look promising, experimentally, but become impossible to manufacture in quantities with an acceptable yield. Remember, unlike LCD screens, the number of faulty pixels must be extremely small, say zero plus or minus zero.

[Flying dutchman]

This new technology is very promising for high-end digital photography, but I have my doubts about digital video cameras.

I am afraid that camera manufacturers will simply employ image sensors that are three times smaller and thus cheaper. Small sensors means small lenses. Small lenses generally have poorer quality and are more prone to prism effects than large lenses.
Light sensitivity is an issue, too.

Besides, given the layered structure, are we by any chance talking about subtractive color mixing (CMY , with its smaller color range instead of RGB) here?

[wkulecz]

Being the skeptical sort, if it were anyone other than Carver Mead (the father of VLSI design methods) behind it, I'd immediately dismiss it as an unmanufacturable pipe dream -- much like the 20TB multilayer optical disk schemes that make the news and then quietly dissapear.

--wally.