Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I. Sensor Chip 8 slides Copyright © 2003 – 2009 Kenji Tachibana

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Sensor Chip: Compact Digital E volving Technology: 1.Next to the lens, the chip is the heart and the most expensive part of all compact digitals. 2.The compact digital sensor chip is about the size and weight of a postage stamp. 4.Imagine dividing the stamp into 10 parts as shown to the right. Divide it 10 more times vertically creating 100 discrete parts. 5.Dividing it into 1,000 sections and seeing it would take a microscope, which I can still imagine. 6.Today’s chips have 10 million discrete light sensitive pixels on a postage stamp size area. That’s totally unimaginable!

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Sensor Chip: Compact Digital E nough Already: 7.10 million means over crowding which results in excessive heat. And heat is the enemy of all electronic devices. 8.5 megapixel ran a lot cooler and it is more than adequate for most practical purposes. So, many photographers would rather see R&D put into getting more real image quality improvements. For the camera maker, selling bigger numbers is an easy-sell.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Sensor Chip: Compact Digital P ractical Size: 5 MP 9.The 5 MP is capable of producing an excellent 8x10 or a good 11x14 print. 10.It’s the bases for the assignment required 2547 x 1955 image size. 11.It produces approximately 2 to 2.5 MP file size which is easy to process and store. 12.Larger file sizes becomes harder to handle, slower to process, and storage space can easily become as issue even with current cheaper storage devices.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Sensor Chip: DSLR DSLR : Pro & Con 1.DSLR sensor chips are about 5x larger. And even the pixels are larger. 2.The larger chip size helps to reduce over crowding, which also reduces the over heating problem. For the DSLR’s, the 10 MP doesn’t does not means over crowding. 3.Besides heat, dust is another huge enemy of the chip. Current flock of DSLR camera bodies comes with assortment of dust fighting mechanisms. Some work better than others. Compact digitals are sealed. They don’t have dust issues.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Sensor Chip: Generic information P ixel Array 1.Sensor chips contains a 16 pixel checker board arrangement (Bayer Pattern) of light sensitive receptors (pixels). 2.Receptors are photo diode which responds to light by producing electricity. Sophisticated circuitry interprets and amplifies the signals to ‘process’ the digital image in conjunction with the camera software referred to as firmware. All DSLR and high end compact digitals are capable to updating the firmware.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Sensor Chip: Generic information Chip Types: 2 main types with variations 1.CCD (charged couple device) is the most popular sensor type found in digital cameras. 2.CMOS produces less heat and is cheaper to make. For those sensible reasons, it is starting to replace CCD’s. It was first successfully used in the Canon Rebel DSLR cameras. 3.Sony was the first to use the CMOS chip for its prosumer digital CyberShot R-1 with a 10 MP pixel count on a APS size chip. 4.Foveon is another kind of sensor chip design. It sounds great on paper but only Samsung has put it into a production digital camera. I am looking forward to seeing its development.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Sensor Chip: Generic information Sensitivity: ISO 1.Most compact digitals have light sensor sensitivity ranging from ISO 100 to 800. Some have a higher numbers such as 1200 or From an image quality point of view, only the ISO 100 is recommended for assignment shoots. Use the ISO 200 for a one-stop gain in aperture or shutter speed under emergency situations. 3.Don’t use speeds higher than 200 because of image quality loss. The ISO has also fallen prey to the false notion that ‘bigger numbers are better’.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Out take from the book: One Digital Day by Rick Smolan Microprocessor: Background The modern microprocessor contains as many as 20 million transistors, and each finished chip is the product of processes more complicated than those used by the Manhattan Project in building the atomic bomb. Yet despite an extraordinarily sophisticated manufacturing process, microchips are produced en masse at the rate of more than a billion each year. To put this complexity in perspective, imagine that within each tiny chip there exists a structure as complex as a mid-sized city. Now imagine that throughout that same city, millions of people are racing around at light speed and with perfect timing in an intricately choreographed dance.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I x End