The Hindu : International : For crisper photos even in poor light

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jun 15, 2007
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International

For crisper photos even in poor light

ROCHESTER: A year from now, capturing a crisp, clear image of a candlelit birthday party could be a piece of cake — even with a camera phone.

Eastman Kodak said on Thursday it has developed colour-filter technology that at least doubles the sensitivity to light of the image sensor in every digital camera, enabling shutterbugs to take better pictures in poor light.

"Low light can mean trying to get a good image indoors of your kid blowing out the birthday candles. It can mean you want to take a photograph on a street corner in Paris at midnight," said a company official. "We're talking about a two-to-four-times improvement in sensitivity."

Analysts agree that the new filter system, intended to supplant an industry-standard filter pattern designed by Kodak scientist Bryce Bayer in 1976, represents a breakthrough in boosting photo quality — especially when light conditions are not ideal. "It's often the most simple concepts that can have the most profound impact," said one of them. "This could be revolutionary in terms of just changing that very simple filter on top of the sensor and basically allowing companies to use it in all different kinds of cameras."

For the mass market

Kodak expects to provide samples of its new technology to a variety of camera manufacturers in the first quarter of 2008. The technology is likely to be incorporated first in mass-market point-and-shoot cameras and camera-equipped mobile phones beginning some time next year.

"Typically new features like this would be more likely to show up in high-end products and then trickle down," said another analyst. "But I think the biggest potential benefit of this may come in the camera phone environment. Camera phones are using smaller sensors to begin with and smaller sensors generally mean smaller pixels, which means lower sensitivity." — AP

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