Planet82's CCD sheds new light on night time photography
By Omar McFarlane 
posted January 9th 2007 4:45AM
posted January 9th 2007 4:45AM
Snapping super-secret spy pics of unreleased products is hard enough as it is without having to worry about blinding flashes tipping off the guards to our dubious activities. Thankfully, Planet82 has announced a CCD chip dubbed the SMPD -- Single carrier Modulation Photo Detector -- which may be the answer to all our problems. The chip's sensitivity is claimed to be 2,000 times higher than your standard sensor, and it's this vast increase in performance that allows it to capture images without the need for flash. No word yet when these chips will make it into consumer cameras and brighten up all our nightshots, but with some of the crappy pics we've taken, it can't come soon enough.
Great! As if CCDs weren't expensive enough, now they come in boutique versions!
It'll be interesting to see whether they come with boutique hype too...
CCD's are not expensive. Look at Kodak's cameras- they actually use two CCD's with two lenses in some cameras now.
If you look at the specs, this would only apply for crappy consumer camcorders;
Pixel Dimensions: 640x480
Frame Rate: up to 30fps
Hopefully Canon will announce something good at PMA (HDR Sensors!)
Shadow noise in current digicam low light photos stems in large part from photon statistics noise ... the fact that photons are discrete and arrive one at a time. Even if you improve the efficiency of detection by a fewfold so that every single photon reaching a CCD is detected, you couldn't achieve a 2000x improvement (unless each pixel is huge). This CCD must be doing effective photon multiplication ... a photon generates an electron-hole pair which is then multiplied within the CCD to create a larger signal. This does nothing to change the photon statistics noise, however. The results is a sensor that can put out a reasonably strong signal in low light, but still an extremely noisy one. Since noise in video is more tolerable than in stills (since the noise is different frame to frame and your eye averages it out), you usually see high-sensitivity light sensors used in real-time/video applications. This is probably intended for the same purpose.
David is exactly correct on this point. Low light means a noisy image no matter how good the sensor is.
So that means we can use our point and shoots in ISO3200000 now. So sensitive it can see ghosts.
I agree with David in some respects, but I have some knowledge about SMPD to be shared with you.
Normal CCD and CMOS sensors uses PN juction diode mechanism to detect the photons, that is why many photons are needed to generate detectable current.
SMPD uses a kind of Transistor mechanism, "Single Carrier Modulation".
when the image sensor is exposed to visble light, lots of photons including noises, Infra Reds, Ultra violets and more ...like David said.
SMPD uses these noises to generate electric current as well as the visual photon as a signal to be detected.
I told that SMPD is a kind of transitor above, as you know the transitor is a kind of electrical device which has a switch if the switch is on, electric current will flow through wire.
What if very small amount of visual photons can trigger the transistor so that few photon switch the current generated by lots of noises flow through wire ?
I do not know how to few photon can trigger the switch of transistor, that is why I'm not rocket scientist.