Saturday, June 26, 2004
Foveon 1/1.8" X3 Image Sensor
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "NEWS" @ 09:00 AM
"Foveon Inc., a technology leader of award-winning high-quality digital camera image sensors, announced today the availability of the Foveon F19 sensor (FO18-50-F19), a 1/1.8-inch 4.5 Megapixel CMOS direct image sensor that incorporates Foveon’s breakthrough X3 technology to directly capture color in three layers, just like film. The company also announced that the F19 image sensor has been designed into the HanVision HVDUO-5M digital camera for industrial, scientific, medical, and communications applications."
It appears that this sensor will be the one used in the Polaroid x530 digital camera which was announced recently at PMA. The X3 follows the same properties as the previous Foveon sensors where light is captured in its constituent red, green, and blue colors at every pixel location on the sensor. This is done by leveraging silicon’s inherent color separation property. The property of silicon is such that blue light is absorbed at the surface of the chip, red light at the bottom while green is absorbed in the middle. The X19 will be able to capture 1440 x 1080 x 3 layers. Hence this new chip is being labeled as a '4.5 Megapixel CMOS Direct Image Sensor'.
All of this sounds excellent, but Foveon was supposed to be this breakthrough technology over two years ago and it really never became as popular as some theorized. I wonder how successful the Polaroid x530 will be. Did anyone invest in a camera with a Foveon chip?
It appears that this sensor will be the one used in the Polaroid x530 digital camera which was announced recently at PMA. The X3 follows the same properties as the previous Foveon sensors where light is captured in its constituent red, green, and blue colors at every pixel location on the sensor. This is done by leveraging silicon’s inherent color separation property. The property of silicon is such that blue light is absorbed at the surface of the chip, red light at the bottom while green is absorbed in the middle. The X19 will be able to capture 1440 x 1080 x 3 layers. Hence this new chip is being labeled as a '4.5 Megapixel CMOS Direct Image Sensor'.
All of this sounds excellent, but Foveon was supposed to be this breakthrough technology over two years ago and it really never became as popular as some theorized. I wonder how successful the Polaroid x530 will be. Did anyone invest in a camera with a Foveon chip?
