new nikon sensor (seriously)

[jamesw]

Nikon's new full-color RGB sensor?
Kudos to one of our forums posters, 'imagewest' for spotting US Patent 7,138,663, assigned to Nikon Corporation of Japan. This patent describes a new type of image sensor which uses three small dichroic mirrors below an opening to direct red, green and blue light to separate photodiodes. This design would provide full color detail at each photo sensing location, a bit like Foveon's X3 sensor (although this design is quite different). A single 'pixel' of light passes first through an element which reflects blue light to the blue photodiode but allows red and green light to pass, the next element reflects green light to the green photodiode but allows red light to pass and the final element reflects red light to the red photodiode but absorbs infrared. Of course this design has all of the advantages we have seen from full-color sensors including , the primary disadvantages must be the complexity of the design and the poor 'fill factor' (which is mitigated somewhat by the use of microlenses). This patent was filed in 2003 so we will have to wait and see if it ever comes to fruition. (15:30 GMT)


http://www.dpreview.com/news/0708/07080 ... sensor.asp

[adam]

Wow~! Hope to see this implemented soon
Thanks

[jamesw]

its been around since 03, well the patent has been, so no idea if its actually going to go anywhere...

[moz]

It does rely on getting microlenses to focus down to a tiny fraction of the sensor area, so that they can split the light into three and build three sensors, all in the space of a single pixel. I suspect that is a big part of the holdup, because if they could do that they'd be using it now in their cameras instead of playing silly games with increased light-sensitive area like they are doing. In fact, Nikon might even be able to give you a full frame sensitive area with a crop sensor, by tweaking the microlenses. Wouldn't that be nice

The problem in an SLR is that the angle of incidence is not constant, a wide-aperture fisheye might cover the range from worse than straight from the centre of the image circle to nearly 90 degrees. So they can't just offset the microlenses and hope for the best. And with this setup they'd need to consider chromatic aberration as well, if those microlenses aren't equirefractive colours from different sides of the aperture would end up in different places... it all sounds a bit fraught to me.

But if they can make it work it would indeed be wonderful.

[phillipb]

I find it strange how you can patent an Idea without a working model.

[jamesw]

i didn't read specifically within the patent document that the sensor had not been made, but feel free to correct me if i'm wrong. i would say there would be some working model somewhere deep in the nikon R&D department.