New 4-Color CCD from Sony

[Imran Zaidi]

Looks like Sony is releasing a new 4-Color CCD for it's digital cameras. Wonder if they will eventually try to integrate something like this into DV cams...

http://www.steves-digicams.com/pr/so...lorCCD_pr.html

[Vladimir Koifman]

I've looked on Sony examples, but to my eye the old 3-color picture is more pleasing. Am I alone?

[Imran Zaidi]

Well it's hard to gauge with a low rez web graphic, but it does seem like there is a lot more color in the gradient on the yellow flowers in the 4-color sample.

I'd like to see some snapshots of human faces. It's always easier to gauge richness with human faces - at least it is for me.

So much is dependent on other things though... monitors (calibrated or uncalibrated), print quality, personal perception, etc. etc.

[Chris Hurd]

I think it's another sign that very soon 1-CCD camcorders will replace 3-CCD camcorders, because one chip will be all you need.

[Ken Tanaka]

True. But, from a pure marketing perspective, it may be a hard sell. "Less" or "fewer" is a real challenge to sell when it refers to a characteristic considered to be a positive attribute for a product. Generally, this is done by repositioning or recategorizing the attribute. Intead of a "1-chip CCD" look for something like "an Advanced Dual Overhead Cam Image Capture Plate (ADOCICP)".

[Chris Hurd]

"...now with five-micron shift registers!"

[Rob Belics]

Well, there goes the color wheel.

[Will Fastie]

This just sounds like a different way to accomplish Canon's "Pixel Shift" operation, which is based on the fact that more information is captured with green pixels than red or blue.

See http://www.canondv.com/gl2/f_pixel_shift.html.

As for 1-CCD replacing 3-CCD, I remain totally confused. Single CCDs already have resolutions well beyond the combined resolution of 3-CCD cams and certainly can handle the speed. If 1-CCD is attractive (I'm assuming because of price and reduced complexity), why are all the high-end consumer and prosumer cams, especially those released in the past year, 3-CCD?

Will

[Mike Rehmus]

I'm guessing it is because to get an equivalent pixel area per color on a 1 CCD chip, it is going to be very big. And that means more expensive optics. Think of a single chip CCD the size of a 35mm frame (they already have them) and extrapolate the size of a 19X zoom (how about the Canon 100X zoom) to cover that size a chip.

[Matt Betea]

It's going to be interesting to see if Nikon uses Sony's new chip or put their own new chip(D2H) in upcoming DSLR's. Should be fun.

[Nigel Moore]

I think it's another sign that very soon 1-CCD camcorders will replace 3-CCD camcorders, because one chip will be all you need.

Hey guys, I may be way off the mark here, and I freely admit that I know little of the physics and optics of CCD systems, but could one advantage of 3-CCD over 1-CCD be the masking of dead pixels?

I know that many cams allow pixel remapping, but surely it's less likely to get the same dead/stuck pixel in 3 CCDs than 1, so the 2 remaining CCDs fill in for the dead pixel. OK, so there will be a colour shift, but less noticeable than white.

Or have I grasped the stick firmly at the wrong end?

[Will Fastie]

That's an interesting theory, Nigel, but my own experience with dead pixels on LCDs makes me think the contrary.

When I first bought my laptop, a red pixel was stuck on. That's one pixel in a field of 1024x768 = 786,432 pixels. The thing was like a beacon, stuck out like a sore thumb, no matter what else was displayed on the screen. The only thing that hid it was a red area right on top of it.

Now this may not be right, but extrapolating that experience to a 3-CCD system and thinking about a white field with one dead pixel, the other two pixels are going to combine to form a color that sharply contrasts with white. I'd expect the resulting pixel to be in sharp contrast and immediately visible.

I sent the laptop back for a replacement. From this forum and others, I gather that's what most of us would do with a cam with one dead pixel, too.

Will

[Balazs Rozsa]

Will Fastie wrote:
>As for 1-CCD replacing 3-CCD, I remain totally confused. Single
>CCDs already have resolutions well beyond the combined
>resolution of 3-CCD cams and certainly can handle the speed.

But light sensitivity remains an important problem of 1-CCD cameras. It may not worth the money for a consumer product to put a prism and 2 more CCDs, but for a professional product it does worth the money.

Why is light sensitivity better for a 3CCD camera? - Let's consider that you build a 1CCD camera and a 3CCD camera using the same CCD chips and put the same lens in front of the cameras. In the case of the 1CCD camera the color filter will block about two third of the light that would go onto the sensors on the CCD. That means that the 3CCD camera will give the same noise and color clarity at about one third the light amount that is required for the 1 CCD camera to give the same noise and color clarity.

If a professional will need to choose between a 1CCD and a 3CCD camera (for the 2/3" format for example), he will choose the 3CCD camera because you need much less lighting for it than in the case of the 1CCD camera for the same image quality. Even if it will be a little more expensive.

If the future will be the CMOS color sensor, the same applies to this type also. Except of course if the new Foveon sensor technology will get better then CCDs. Now this technology is noisier.

So I think where quality will be the priority, it will be 3CCD for a long time unless some new technology emerges. And I think that even the extra high definition movie cameras will be 3CCD cameras if they will get widespread in a few years. Now Dalsa is making it's 8 megapixel 1 chip camera, but their reasoning for 1CCD is not better picture quality, but that this 1 chip solution can be put into current movie camera equipment much more seemlessly.

Balazs

[Imran Zaidi]

I'm sure if these 4-color ccds take off, they'll be making 4-color 3ccd cameras for 2 times the cost of 1 camera today with 1/2 of the advanced functionality we want.