I just realized that mentioning digikey might fall into the realm of talking about places that sell stuff that isn't a dvinfo sponsor, but since they don't really deal in video equipment I don't think Chris will mind. (Chris, if you see this and you do mind, please just pull my post)

Digikey is a parts retailer/almost OEM supplier. They sell your do-dads and what-ca-ma-call-its. Like resistors, capactitors, IC's, some imaging sensors. Almost anything electronic at the smallest level.

Yes, I remember now. What is this about sponsors?

Chris Hurd, the guy running this place doesn't normally let people talk about non-sponsor companies. The sponsors for here are like B&H and EVS and stuff, thiers a link to the top right that lists them.

Anyway, I don't think Chris lurks in here to much or cares to much about mentioning part suppliers because its outside of the realm of the normal.

Do you guys think it would be crazy to have more than a 3 CCD set-up?

To what end?

Three CCD/cmos/sensor setups have a simple purpose. To seperate the incoming wavelenghts and send them to 3 different sensors, so one for red, one green and one blue, all with fairly hardline cut offs for spectral response because of the nature of the prisms.

My original understanding was the prisms were used to seperate the light, but i've heard that some 3 sensor setups use single colour filters which would reduce light even more, either way their is light loss with prisms and it is apparently an issue for larger sized sensors.

How are you thinking about spliting it, are you just concerned with increasing sensor size by using multiple smaller sensors, or pixel shift or what?

their was someone that connected two DV cameras together to make one larger sensor here a while ago. It was interesting and sucessful, needed some tweaking in after effects to fix the seam but it was neat.

A 3 sensor setup using cheap cmos sounds possible without to much trouble but you need a fairly complex setup to align the sensors and mount them onto the prisms. Its to bad you can't get a sensor with only a blue red pattern and use a 2 sensor setup with a monochrome to make 4:2:2. Much easier to deal with large scale data this way.

Unless you want to so some extreme pixel shift stuff, or do special stuff to use two extra sensors, one for IR and one for UV, it is a bit of over kill. I have considered it myself previously. What Keith says is ok, but look on the web for home made/DIY vacuum Chambers, prisms, and alignment stuff, I might have seen one specifically used on a sensor.

Keith that dual camera setup, sounds interesting, you know that you can source prisms to do that so the seam problem is less of a problem. Olympus did it for their SHD camera. If you had three cameras on their sides you would have close to 2.35:1 720p 5:1 Dv through a prism. Ohh, driving everybody crazy again ;).