Imaging: Help Me Improve My Resolution
With CES out of the way, I'm now turning my attention to my upcoming mid-March feature article on imaging, whose first draft is due later this month. Below is the description I've passed along to relevent vendors, and I'd also welcome your thoughts.
In his September 2004 cover story on image sensors, Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert predicted that their pixel count growth rate would eventually slow, and that their customers would subsequently be also forced to differentiate via other measures of image quality and capability. That prognostication has indeed come to pass, and the subsequent redirection to other differentiation schemes:
- decreased click-to-capture and click-to-click latencies
- increased auto-focus speed and accuracy
- improved exposure and illumination intelligence
- the inclusion of video (and higher-resolution and -framerate video) capabilities within still image cameras, competitively counterbalanced by videocameras' enhanced still image capture capabilities
- auto-B&W, auto-sepia, auto-'slimming' and other within-camera image manipulation features
- additional capture formats, both for still image, audio and video
- etc
has had significant impacts on various camera (and camera phone) subsystems; sensors, imaging processors, nonvolatile and volatile memory, interconnect between various subsystems, etc. Brian will cover these impacts, specifically focusing on the design process 'tension' between the desire for added performance and capability versus systems' increasingly stringent size (impacting both electronics and optics), weight, cost and power consumption constraints. He'll also discuss next-generation image processing ideas coming out of academia, which provide insight into the features that cameras of the future may tout.
Are you redirecting your imaging systems' feature lists in the face of slowing pixel growth? If so, in what directions, and with what sorts of supplier assistance? Let me and your fellow readers know, ideally via the comments or, if you prefer, via private email. Please note that, as I've mentioned to several companies in follow-up correspondence, any system that captures a still image or video image stream is a potential coverage candidate….still and video cameras (including security systems), camera phones, etc.
