The website EOShd.com reported what Panasonic engineer T. Azuma’s said during the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco (which took place last week).
Basically Azuma says that Panasonic developed a sensor based on ‘dual exposure technique’ which improves the sensitivity by a factor of 4. This goal has been archived allowing green pixels to be read independently of the blue and red ones on the sensor. They are exposed four times longer than the red and blue pixels.
More details on EOShd.com.
8 Responses
Now this would be a worthwhile upgrade from an E-P1. I may switch over to Panasonic for this. Please change the dslr “look”.
Does this mean also better DR?
That story does not make any sense to me. Since green light sensitivity is inherently about twice that of red or blue, why should the green pixels need 4 times more exposure to achieve higher sensitivity for the sensor?
The blog includes a picture of a Panasonic graphic showing production sites in Japan.
One of the illustrations is of a bare camera body – is this an old Panasonic (looks a bit like an L1) or the chassis for the new range-topping GH2?
This is the kind of step forward that everyone expects from m43 nad it’s taking forever to be developed.
Better signal/noise, better DR, in camera HDR, superresolution, all of this can come true.
Sounds fun! 🙂
From the EOSHD article:
“As a side note, I have noticed that newer stock of GH1s produce a slightly better image with less codec break up and banding than in the GH1’s whose image sensors were produced at the older fab”.
¿Can anybody confirm this difference obout IQ betwen two different series of GH1?
Let us assume that the quote is correct: the green pixels are exposed four times longer than the others. How could this be done with a mechanical shutter? Does the quote not indicate that Panasonic will use a fully electronic shutter? I recall that rumors about Panasonic developing a fully electronic, shutterless m43 sensor have been raised earlier. This would be much bigger news then the fact that Panasonic is working to improve light sensitivity, which is a given.