Wider Latitude CCDs...
 

Hey, I've been poking around the net and I found something interesting. Fuji has CCD's for their still cameras that supposedly have 4x the latitude of existing cameras. They're called Super CCD SRs and they apparently have two diodes for every one pixel recorded (if I'm reading this right). Anyway, one responds to large amounts of light, the other responds to lower amounts of light. They even will clear 30 frames per second in 640x480 video.

Is anyone attempting to develop this technology for video? This seems like an answer to one of the big benefits that film offers over video. Can you imagine a 1920x1080 HD cam with comparable latitude to 16mm film? That would be sweet indeed.

Also, from what I can gather, the camera using it employs a roughly 24mm sensor. This would help with depth of field issues, right?

Anyways, here's a press release on it. There's some in depth info at the bottom: Super CCD SR

I assume then that this is either old hat stuff (I mean the chips were announced a year ago) or that no one knows anything... Thanks anyways...

I was a the fuji site a while ago and it seems that they are not very interested in selling ccd to many developers, let alone low volume to the public so it pretty much makes it impossible to get the ccds, which is a big problem with many companies. If your making semiconductor products like ccds and have made an advancement, do you really want to sell to your rival and let them get ahead.

Their are only a handful of sensors that seem good and avaliable to the general public

Yes, this info is atleast a year old, but I'm not sure if it was ever posted here. And you really have a point, even this Fuji-thing is old, it's still the thing that's missing on all other CCD:s and CMOS:s. There's some HDR-CMOS sensors out there, but they are mostly black and white, and only 1.3 megapixel (for example Basler's A600/A601f: http://www.baslerweb.com/produkte/produkte_en_1455.php)

Its true that the technology exists for wider latitude CCD's but the market isn't demanding it yet. At least I don't think.

Might I go so far as to say that with this first gen. of prosumer HD cameras the latitudinal properties of the higher end cam's will be exploited to compete?

Sounds like a typical tier'ed process. So my guess: 3 years from now wider lat. will be a common property among HD cameras.

Dean

Three years seems like a long time to adopt something that seems so obviously needed, but if it happens in 3 years instead of 5 or 10 I'd be happy.

It just seems odd that, given that most every DP's complaint about digital v. film is about the latitude, and yet no one is working on these chips except Fuji, who is generally not the "big name" in digit photography.

I'm assuming Fuji has some kind of patent or whatnot on this technology, keeping others from developing it?

Keep in mind there are CMOS chips with 10 or 12 bits of latitude. This is
generally considered to be quite good to work with. So most people who
really need the extra latitude are probably using that?