A couple of weeks ago a trusted source told me how Sony is working to bring some major evolution in the sensor technology. We are talking about a completely new generation of sensors which could hit the market as soon as late 2013- early 2014. One of these technologies is the “organic sensor”. The last few months I saw some patents from Fuji and now finally Egami (Click here) found one from Sony. Basically we are talking about a sort of Foveon technology made with organic material instead of current non organic materials. The major flaws to overcome are the slow speed and durability of the material. But Sony seems to have found some sort of hybrid material solution that could overcome the issues. While google translation doesn’t really help a lot to understand how it works I will try to give you a short summary:
1) The sensor is made by a organic and non organic material. That is necessary because organic material has less “speed” than the non organic silicon material.
2) Three layers of organic material are positioned one under the other. This means every single pixel contains all the color data!
3) The advantages are higher color fidelity, higher resolution because of the lack of the Anti Aliasing filter which usually needs to be used on RGB sensors. Currently [shoplink 12209 ebay]Medium format cameras[/shoplink] or cameras like the Fuji X PRO 1, Nikon D800 and Leica M9 do not have AA filters. Another advantage is that organic material has a higher absorption coefficient than non organic material.
As usual keep in mind that most of the patents will never be applied in a real mass production camera. Or it may will take longer than we hope. Anyway, Sony is already on a very high quality level with their current sensors and I am pretty confident that we will see great new stuff in future!
P.S.: The current Sony 36 Megapixel sensor used by the Nikon D800 is almost as good as medium format cameras according to DSRLmagazine testing.
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Links to all mentioned cameras:
Medium format cameras on [shoplink 12209 ebay]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink]. Nikon D800 at Amazon (Click here). Fuji X PRO 1 at Amazon (Click here). Leica M9 at Amazon (Click here).
29 Responses
Hope this is wrong and that it will be in the A99!!!
No chance 🙂
And take on the Nikon D800? That would be suicide for Sony! More D800s sold the better for Sony! LOL!
Unlike the previous vertically stacked sensor patents Sony has filed, this one is especially close to the Foveon design in overall effect. While the Foveon uses three layers of partially transmissive semiconductors, Sony’s approach is to channel the photons through an organic waveguide, and somehow split the light into primaries (dichroic filters?) to feed to the inorganic photodiodes.
I’m not sure how much less crosstalk it will have compared to the Foveon, but it’ll probably require less amplification and have better high ISO at least.
is a business agreement with Sony to sell the sensor on the Nikon, so Nikon had the opportunity in advance to sell his camera on the market for some time, so there is no direct competition from sony until new sony full frame camera come.
sony still profit by the sale of the sensor and its name come up through the nikon camera, and again they can evaluate the shortcomings of the new sensor ..
That’s what I’m hoping for – that Sony will learn from D800 and release something better…
Although I’m somehow worried that chances for this to happen are closer to 1/100.
how retarded is that??? sony makes a couple bucks off the sensors, but the major money is in selling the camera body itself, then you hook the customers onto the lenses, flashes, accessories. now all those customers are hooked onto nikon, which means less sony addicts. all for some chump change selling the sensors.
maybe sony should give away free sensors if all those other camera makers agree to use only sony a-mount?
or maybe mr. sony is having sex with nikon’s daughter?
D800 – includes AA filter
D800E – no AA filter
Pedantic, I know, but important to get right.
+1
We could be more pedantic and state that BOTH the D800 and D800E have an AA filter. 😉
In the D800E setup, the second low pass filter is basically an inverse version of the first and mostly cancels out the effects of the first. http://i43.tinypic.com/9zrqcw.jpg
Thanks for the link!! Cool to see.
How is it that we can call a filter that has “all the anti-aliasing properties removed” an AA filter? *boggle* Then, when have you heard of a low pass filter that realigns two different light paths directly on top of each other. Again, *boggle*.
Quote from:
http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d800/features01.htm
A low-pass filter is an AA filter, fact. It has two low-pass filters, fact as confirmed by Nikon’s own data. The two filters mostly cancel out the small blur that the normal setup of 2 low-pass filters has (Nikon calls the remaining effect “minimal blur”). But there’s still a low-pass/AA filter. That’s all there is to it. 😉
A low pass filter is not necessarily an anti-aliasing filter. For example, if you have a 20khz signal, a 10khz low pass filter, and a 5khz sample rate… the low pass filter is certainly not an anti-aliasing filter. A thing that has “all the anti-aliasing properties removed” is necessarily NOT an AA filter. A filter that takes two parallel beams of light and aligns them is NOT a low pass filter.
Nikon’s pictures and their words do not really make sense together. If you do something (vertical split) and then undo that something (vertical merge)… then you end up not really having done anything. Doing nothing is not a very good way to anti-alias.
Just curious, have you heard of Nyquist?
But it isn’t doing “nothing”. Minimal blur is still blur.
Minimal blur is also not a very good way to anti-alias… All anti-aliasing is a matter of degree (until the high frequencies have been reduced enough to fall beyond the single bit signal level of the sensor), but seriously.
I suspect that the AA filters that some seem to think cause blurry images are probably reasonable for anti-aliasing. Barely noticeable blur is certainly not. Anyways, the image you provided (a modified version of the Nikon original) says:
“Vertically split image is recombined, removing effect of low-pass filter”
Certainly, it won’t perfectly remove the effect of the first filter, but it’s kind of silly to claim that the D800E does have an AA filter because Nikon tried to make optics without AA properties but did so imperfectly thus actually manufacturing the D800E with an AA filter despite that being directly against their goals…
Of course, the simplest argument was made by Nikon themselves on the D800 page:
“The D800E incorporates an optical filter with all the anti-aliasing properties removed”
http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d800/features01.htm
Do you think that they are lying when they say this? If that quote isn’t enough, how about this one from the same page:
“Note: The D800E carries an increased possibility that moiré and false color will appear, compared to the D800. IR cut and antireflective coating properties of the optical filter remain the same with both versions.”
So, they say both that the D800E does not have an AA filter and that the D800E is more likely to exhibit aliasing. Yet you still are trying to argue that the D800E does in fact have an AA filter?
As to claiming that minimal blur is still blur… I’ll give you that one. I’m just not sure how it is relevant to a discussion of AA filters.
Where is the BIG FF RUMOR??? 🙂
We will see a new BIG full-frame rumor in a day or so.
The website traffic volume will spike up again and then back down.
The same posters will rant the same rants; over and over this goes.
Looks like cross section of retina
Nothing here to take to market in the next two years – which is not good given Sony’s economic situation. Is this the big rumor Andrea????
Why all the muss and fuss over this, if it’s the “BIG” rumor. You’ve posted other patents before without all the hoopla, and they’ve turned out to be nothing. You acknowledge in this article that “that most of the patents will never be applied in a real mass production camera”, so why all the hype? Again, I ask, is this the BIG rumor??????
“Patience, my young Padawan.” 😉
New Full Frame camera will have 100MP interpolated technology with 4.0 crop for the old farts that likes to take pictures of little kids bathrooms from their balconies.
Now everyone can go and have a whack off.
I don’t think so, normally things that are so far off wouldn’t be considered a BIG rumor… But I could be wrong.
I have an orgasmic sensor on the end of my….never mind… wrong blog…
Heh
I am wondering if Sony is preparing its own the ClearVid Cmos sensor technology for future Alpha SLTs:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/technology/technology/theme/clearvitcmos_01.html#block3
As allready demonstrated in F65-Video camera which use a 20MPix APS-C-HD sensor, this could easily adopted to APS-C and FF future SLT-models.
Sony has developed this technology several years ago, merged it with the Exmor technology and Bionz processing power to have a sensor that is unmatched.
An SLT-A99 with a Clearvid HD Sensor will leave the Canikons back in the dust. Hoping the new management allows to use and further implement this technology in future SLT cameras.
“Organic”? Does that mean it’s ALIVE?
brought to you “in living color”
It’s half organic – does that mean it’s undead?
Is it ethical to use this sensor? Will it turn on me?