Digital camera sensor new, improved

Posted: Sunday, March 24, 2002

Recently, I attended the 2002 Photo Marketing Convention in Orlando, Fla., where dozens of way-cool digital photographic products were introduced - from easy to use point-and-shoot cameras to digital picture stations for retail stores.

In addition, new 35-mm films and film cameras were being shown for consumers who want to stick with traditional photography.

The press conferences were nonstop. One of the more interesting was held by a company called Foveon (www.foveon.com). The Foveon team, headed by Carver Mead, a physicist, talked about its new digital camera image sensor that he developed, the Foveon X3. The sensor is said to capture improved digital pictures (three times better - hence the X3 designation) at a lower cost and with less battery consumption than the sensors in today's digital cameras.

The technology is brand new. Only one camera shown at the PMA convention, the Sigma SD9 (sigma-photo.com), incorporated the Foveon X3 chip. The SLR (single lens reflex) camera is expected to be available later this year and will sell for less than $3,000.

As for today's digital camera technology, I'm pleased with the quality of the images from my consumer and professional digital cameras.

One of my pictures, taken in India with a $300 consumer digital camera, filled the cover of eDigitalPhoto.com magazine. And my friends like the 11-by-14-inch inkjet prints I make from my digital files. In addition, while walking around the PMA convention, I saw 20-by-30-inch and even 40-by-60-inch knockout prints taken with conventional digital cameras. In one enlargement, I could see the subject's eyelashes.

Back to Foveon. How does the sensor work? Well, in condensed, nontech talk, conventional digital camera sensors have pixels that only record red, green or blue light - one color per pixel.

Therefore, some information is not recorded when a picture is taken - because not every pixel records all the colors. The Foveon X3 sensor has pixels that record all three colors - so all the color information is recorded.

Foveon uses a sensor (CMOS) that uses less battery power and is less expensive to produce than the sensors (CCDs) in most of today's digital cameras.

Special software, which comes with Foveon sensor-equipped cameras, is needed to transfer pictures into a computer.

That's because Foveon images are recorded in what's called a RAW file, unlike most consumer digital cameras that record pictures in the popular JPEG format, which can be transferred to a computer with a memory card reader.

At the press event, Mead showed impressive comparison photographs of Foveon vs. conventional image sensors - images that were hand-picked to show the differences between the two technologies. But the big surprise was a videotape he shared with the audience.

The expert on the tape said, "Foveon shares our passion for pushing the envelope, and Foveon's new approach to image capture and rendering demonstrates this." The expert was Microsoft's Bill Gates.

In case you were wondering where Foveon got its name, Foveon's Eric Zarakov explains: "The fovea is the part of the human eye's retina that records the sharpest detail, and the 'eon' in the name stands for electronics. Basically we feel that the sensor will see what our eyes see."

Trending this week:


© 2018. All Rights Reserved.  | Contact Us