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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Hey, will this have any effect on new sensors?

Jon Howe

Jon Howe

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So I read this today. Here's an exerpt:
"With the accidental discovery of "black silicon," Harvard physicists may have very well changed the digital photography, solar power and night vision industries forever. What is black silicon, you say? Well, it's just as it sounds. Black silicon. It's what this revolutionary new material does that's important, starting with light sensitivity. Early indications show black silicon is 100 to 500 times more sensitive to light than a traditional silicon wafer."

"The new experiment made the silicon black to the naked eye. Under an electron microscope, however, the dark sheen was revealed to be thousands, if not millions, of tiny spikes. As we said above, those spikes had an amazing effect on the light sensitivity of the wafer. Mazur said the material also absorbs about twice as much visible light as traditional silicon, and can detect infrared light that is invisible to today's silicon detectors.

And there's no change to the manufacturing process, Mazur said, so existing semiconductor facilities can create black silicon without much additional effort or, more importantly, money."
 
I'm not quite sure I'd want the camera to be even 10 times more sensitive. Unless the sensor was an Imax sized sensor. The reason why is because you'd either have to ND the lens like crazy or shoot with T22 or T32. If you ND'd then you've have IR problems and if you shot at T22 you'd lose the shallow depth of field.

Now what would rock is if they could put black silicon right next to the normal silicon and have two sensitivity ranges going on at once, so your shadows would be using the black silicon and the normal silicon would be shooting the mids and highlights. That would make for noiseless shadows :)
 
Holy shit. Maybe that's the secret of monstro.
 
Actually, after reading the article, I'm not sure it could be used in camera sensors. It's a great prospect for a real world application of solar power.
 
The future

The future

The only need for Master Primes would be if a very shallow DOF is required.
Those RED primes are starting to look like the bargain of the century...
Would love to see a pro 16 to 44 ish T2.8 RED vari-prime soon. Jim?
 
First of all, I expect that Jim's people have already been among those talking to the company marketing this process.
Second, I don't see anything about the noise floor, they just talk about sensitivity. (I didn't read it in detail though I admit.)
Even so, I would love to have one in each of my Reds so that I could operate with less light. But, just "dropping one in" wouldn't give you the extra dynamic range you are talking about, even if, as we all hope, the noise floor is unchanged. The problem is that the camera would need the rest of the circuitry changed: Higher resolution A to D converter (16bit), probably all new image processing circuits to be able to process the wider data, and a new recording system to handle the higher data rates. The point is, that this will take a while. The good news is that even just replacing the sensor would probably yield a large improvment. Most importantly, we may be on the brink of a great additional improvment in a host of products including the one we hold so dear. Exciting prospects for sure.

Practical photocells; not a bad thing either.

Dave
 
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