You just know the FBI, CIA, et al are looking forward to this in their efforts to make us safe.
100x Sensitivity Image Sensor Based on Solar-cell Structure
Rohm Co Ltd and the Research Center for Photovoltaics of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have announced that they have succeeded in prototyping a CIGS (Cu-In-Ga-Se) image sensor that has approximately 100 times the sensitivity of CCD, CMOS and other Si-based image sensors.
They have confirmed that their sensor can recognize images in environments as dark as 0.001lx, which is difficult for existing Si image sensors, they said. As the new image sensor can also recognize images with light in the near infrared zone, expected applications include automotive cameras, monitoring cameras, iris and vein authentication, which must support image sensing under lighting conditions ranging from bright to dark.
Voyeur porn will probably be the first commercial industry to adopt this technology.
Heck, I’m still waiting for the much-touted sensors from http://www.foveon.com/ to make their way into a consumer product besides the SLRs from Sigma. It was announced as a ‘revolution’ in imaging tech, but got no notice from the biggies – Canon and Nikon.
Oh well – this will probably end up in only niche products like security and medical imagers.
I’ll go for 100 times cheaper over 100 times more sensitive every time. Wake me up when it’s a commodity item.
OR–adapt current technology. HDR or High Dynamic Range technique is awesome.
Free great photos at this website “look like” HDR images to me, but don’t know if they are.
http://tinyurl.com/4o6dop
Good invention.
Let’s give it to some foreign company to manufacture.
This is really cool. I often have trouble with crepuscular and nocturnal wildlife. This will make it a hundred times easier. Yup. Let’s definitely sell the technology to some foreign company, probably in Malaysia, so that we can see the benefits of this for only 50% more than we used to pay when at least the dollar was worth something.
This is years away from commercialization, with lots of process control problems to be worked out.
By the way, the link to the previous story takes me to an administrative log-in screen instead…
This new sensor looks amazing and promising, it would be so great to take pictures in low lighting and have them very sharp, like in concerts, without having to spend big bucks on the very expensive fast lenses.