Future of CCDs?

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6263551.stm

A single pixel camera? "Hopefully it will get smaller," he said. Thats nuts!

Had a read of that article, and some of it is just bewildering! I mean, to create a million mirrors, each the size of a bacterium, to break up light onto a single pixel...

Wow...

Maybe I'm just stupid and totally missing the point. The article seems to be blaming JPG comression for the inefficiencies of CCD's. This is patently untrue. As we all know jpg compression is nothing to do with the CCD itself merely a way of compressing the data afterwards. Have they ever heard of RAW images! Also, and again I must be missing the point here, but they use lots of tiny mirrors to direct the incoming light to this single pixel sensor. I singularly fail to see the point in that. You still end up with a multi pixel image just that one pixel has to work a few million times harder.

I'm guessing the article is a fudge for the non-techies. Or else its just badly written. I'm pretty sure the developers wouldn't go to all that trouble for no reason.

Maybe I'm just stupid and totally missing the point. The article seems to be blaming JPG comression for the inefficiencies of CCD's. This is patently untrue. As we all know jpg compression is nothing to do with the CCD itself merely a way of compressing the data afterwards. Have they ever heard of RAW images! Also, and again I must be missing the point here, but they use lots of tiny mirrors to direct the incoming light to this single pixel sensor. I singularly fail to see the point in that. You still end up with a multi pixel image just that one pixel has to work a few million times harder.

I'm guessing the article is a fudge for the non-techies. Or else its just badly written. I'm pretty sure the developers wouldn't go to all that trouble for no reason.

I have to say my thoughts were the exact same as yours Dave. Just thought some people here might know a bit more about the whole thing that I did and could shed some light on the article, if you pardon the pun.

Also, and again I must be missing the point here, but they use lots of tiny mirrors to direct the incoming light to this single pixel sensor. I singularly fail to see the point in that. You still end up with a multi pixel image just that one pixel has to work a few million times harder.

I'm guessing the article is a fudge for the non-techies. Or else its just badly written. I'm pretty sure the developers wouldn't go to all that trouble for no reason.

I was hoping someone else could make sense of it... are the mirrors less noisy than regular charge transfer across the whoole chip? Wouldn't the exposure speed be limited?

As for jpegs, well the assertion is true for something like a camera phone where the compression is really bad, but I know when I convert my raw's to jpegs I dont loose 90% of the data.

Perhaps their technology has some application that I havent considered.

a million microscope mirrors!, I'd say its easier to keep on making the CCDs that are here, they are getting bigger and cheaper, this sounds like a load of cobblers to me.