RE: Future of Photography (was RE: filmscanners: real value?)

["Austin Franklin" <austin@darkroom.com>]

What you suggest can not be made today, with current technology for process,
packaging and material.  You have to get all the wires out of the die, AND
it has to be done such that crosstalk is eliminated, as well as adjacent
sensors interfering with each other.

Speed is not really an issue either, as the sensor can be segregated into
quadrants to speed up capture, and parallel flash/micro drives could be used
for storage.

The D30 works so well BECASUE it has a large array.  The large array
practically eliminates the sensor noise/crosstalk issue, as well as the
packaging issue...since it's easy to get less wires out of a larger package.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk]On Behalf Of Murphy, Bob H
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 6:28 PM
> To: 'filmscanners@halftone.co.uk'
> Subject: RE: Future of Photography (was RE: filmscanners: real value?)
>
>
> I don't think the image sensor is the problem.
>
> I'm talking about a die that is the same size as the current
> one used in the
> Canon D30, namely 22.7mm horizontal only made with pixels the
> size currently
> used in the Olympus 3030, Nikon 990, etc. or about 3.0x
> smaller in each
> direction. This makes for an array of "conventional" pixels in a
> "conventionally" sized die totaling 30 million. Why couldn't
> this be done
> today? I suspect the answer is market strategy - not
> technology. Furthermore
> today's camera electronics could handle an image of this size provided
> customers were willing to wait 9 times longer for the data to
> be written to
> an on-camera 1GB microdrive or 10 seconds perhaps for a high
> quality jpg.
>
> I know the small pixels in the <$1000 3Mpixel digicams are
> nosier than the
> D30's and are awful when shot an iso greater than 100 but I
> believe the
> market has proven that they're clean enough for a good, well
> exposed image.
> And 30 million of them would make one awesome image. Finally,
> you could
> always resample it down to 3.3 Mega pixels and get (I
> predict) a much better
> shot than the current D30 can produce.
>
> Why can't this be doe today?
>
>   --Bob
>