HI, Bob!
That's one of the points I feel most secure about.
There is that lower limit to how small the CCD elements (photon buckets) can
be. Too small and they get noisy, smaller than that and they are too small
to respond to visible light!
Then there is the upper limit dictated by how well we can make semiconductor
devices without flaws. The larger they are, the more likely to include a
flaw. Thus, the larger they are, the more expensive (exponentially with die
area, I've been told) they are! (This partially explains the horrific cost
of medium format digital backs, and the "astronomical" cost of astronomical
"large" CCD arrays (up to $25000 as advertised in Sky and Telescope
magazine!!!))
So, you see, there is an upper boundary to size and a lower boundary to
size, and we are pushing at both of them!
I, therefore, am somewhat skeptical about seeing any 30Mpixel devices
anytime soon. Possibly if there is a major breakthrough in manufacturing of
imaging arrays allowing for larger cheaper arrays, but physics dictates that
lower limit to element size. Just because there has been an explosion of
newer and better digital cameras over the last five years doesn't mean that
that rate of improvement can continue!
There also needs to be a market for these 30Mpixel devices to make them and
make them affordable! Joe Pointenshoot won't be pushing for that kind of
quality unless it is cheap (by cheap I mean costs less than a 1.5Mpixel
camera does now), which kind of defeats the market drive.
Really, I hope you are right!!! I just am a little too close to the
engineering side of this to be this optomistic!
Guy Clark
-----Original Message-----
From: Murphy, Bob H [mailto:bob.h.murphy@lmco.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 11:24 AM
To: 'filmscanners@halftone.co.uk'
Subject: RE: Future of Photography (was RE: filmscanners: real value?)
I'm not too sure about the pixel and array size statement. The CCD's in
current 3.3Mpixel CCD cameras like the Olympus 3030 have a diagonal
dimension about a third that of the Canon D30 SLR digicam's sensor. As
signal processing and memory get faster and lower power (which happens at a
steady factor of 2 about every 18-24months) it will be reasonable to have a
30megapixel device in a camera like the D30 with pixels the same size as the
current Olympus 3030. Given Moore's Law (see:
) this could happen
within the next 6 to 10 years.
--Bob
