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[OM] Re: The Foveon CMOS camera

Subject: [OM] Re: The Foveon CMOS camera
From: Chuck Norcutt <norcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 06:07:25 -0400
For lots of detail see the following:

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19990708S0026

Here are a few extracts.  Note that is uses three sensors with a beam
splitter.  I hope the camera as described is a prototype:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Foveon avoids the color-interpolation problem by using a different
technique, which splits the incoming light into three beams with a
prism. The prism focuses the red light on a red sensor, the blue light
on a blue sensor and the green light on a green sensor. That approach
uses three times as many sensor chips, plus a multifaceted prism, but
eliminates the moire-pattern problem. 

Foveon attaches its sensors directly to the prism faces with glue that
has the same index of refraction as the optical glass of the prisms,
which eliminates the reflection and blurring problems of earlier
designs. The company has a patent pending for the process it uses to
attach its sensors directly to the prism. 

Foveon's analog VLSI chip dedicates fewer or greater resources to each
particular area of an image, depending on the detail and light levels at
that point. Consequently, the company does not say how many pixels per
inch or bits per pixel are captured with its three chips because that
depends on the part of the image in question. The one specification it
does supply, however,   hints at the size of its analog VLSI sensor:
When it is ready to output a digital image to a printer, the camera
produces a 48-Mbyte, 4,000- x 4,000-pixel Photoshop file. 

The Foveon camera looks like a Wintel laptop with a squared-off Hula
Hoop surrounding it and a Canon 28-mm to 70-mm lens attached to the
front. You aim the laptop with attached lens at the subject and you see
a continuous image on the left-hand side of the screen. When the user
presses the space bar, the external flash is triggered, and a shot is
taken and placed on the right-hand side of the screen. 
-----------------------------------
Chuck Norcutt
Woburn, Massachusetts, USA

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