Replies

Use of separate CCD's for red/green/blue is common in high-end ($10K-plus) video equipment; I would expect digital cameras to be similar in that regard.

Actually, the biggest thing I'd like to see as an improvement for electronic cameras would be the ability to shoot simultaneous or near-simultaneous pictures with different exposure settings and post-combine them. This would be an especially useful technique for video where tripling the bandwidth out of the CCD's would not pose a particular problem.

The way I would set things up would be to have the camera, rather than scan even scan lines every ~64us, then odd scan lines every ~64us, instead scan lines three times as fast in a shuffled arrangement such that three images were produced: the first would let each scan line collect only 4.096us worth of light (64 line times); the second would let it collect only 128us (2 line times); and the last would integrate over the rest of the frame. The first two images would go through a digital delay so that all three images would be perfectly synchronized with each other. They would then be processed, compressing contrast as needed for best effect.

This would allow a video camera to shoot scenes in what would otherwise be totally impossible lighting. For example, in some of the footage of my wedding, most of the church is a completely dark void while my wife shows up as a super-saturated white blob. Opening up the exposure would make the background show up well, but turn by wife into an even more smeared white blob; closng down the exposure would make my wife show up somewhat better, but completely obliterate everything else in the picture. Combining the both effects in real-time, however, should make it possible to get the best of both worlds.

Anyone who works with CCD's have any idea whether such an idea would be feasible? It unfortunately cannot be done at board-level (because the CCD's scan in fixed order) but should not require any exotic new technologies at the chip level--just the ability to read out scan-lines in shuffled sequence. While some post-processing would be needed, it would probably require anything beyond the level of sophistication already found in mid-range video cards.

Anyone find that idea intriguing?