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Kodak takes the flash out of photos
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A curious innovation by Kodak, full article here.
[edit: the mag apparently requires registration. Full article quoted here, so.]
MacUser wrote:
News
Thursday 14th June 2007
Kodak takes the flash out of photosKodak has developed a digital camera technology that nearly eliminates the need for flash photography.
The world’s biggest maker of photographic film says its proprietary sensor technology significantly increases sensitivity to light.
Kodak said the new technology advances an existing Kodak standard in digital imaging. Today, the design of almost all colour image sensors is based on the ‘Bayer Pattern,’ an arrangement of red, green, and blue pixels first developed by Kodak scientist Bryce Bayer in 1976.
In this design, half of the pixels on the sensor are used to collect green light, with the remaining pixels split evenly between sensitivity to red and blue light.
After exposure, software reconstructs a full colour signal for each pixel in the final image. Kodak’s new proprietary technology adds ‘clear’ pixels to the red, green, and blue elements that form the image sensor array, collecting a higher proportion of the light striking the sensor.
Manufacturing customers interested in the design will likely get a chance to sample it in early 2008, but Kodak is unsure when devices using the technology would be in stores. The technology could be used at first in devices such as mobile phones and eventually products made for industrial and scientific imaging.
Analysts claim Kodak will probably use the technology for its own cameras, hoping to gain a competitive edge. ‘The potential is always there, but it’s a wait-and-see thing,’ says Christopher Chute of research firm IDC.
Playing the patents
Kodak, which is in the last year of a lengthy and expensive transformation into a digital photography company as its film business shrinks, intends to lean on its wealth of intellectual property to boost its bottom line, expecting up to $250 million this year alone in royalties and related revenues.
For example, chief executive Antonio Perez has previously said its new inkjet printer strategy grew out of the discovery of existing, unused patents for printer ink.
‘Our strategy is to get it out of the lab and onto the street,’ says Chris McNiffe, general manager, Kodak Image Sensor Solutions.
Analysts have looked at that outlook sceptically, since Kodak has given few details about the types of patents it intends to exploit. Moreover they say licensing contracts are incremental and hard to bank on in the long term.
‘They have been guarded about their portfolio, with certain degrees of success,’ says IDC’s Chute. ‘But at the end of the day you need to have invented something or have some kind of intellectual property in order to maintain a market position.’
Reuters
Smashing idea. What about my coveted dark stage spaces at gigs? Would love to get a half decent shutter speed to freeze the action without resorting to flash; would love to fill in those dark shadows with just ambient light. Noise, can’t forget about noise. And never mind those stark backlit snapshots on the beach, or the mad pub shots taken at an angle of the lads being utterly pub-ified. :shock:
For an average subject at average light values they might be onto something. But I don’t see flash being ‘nearly eliminated’ any time soon. I guess they’ll target the consumer market as usual, but it’ll be interesting to see if any of the biggies pick their brains about it, it could be a boon to photojournalists for example in courthouses or galleries.
But I’ll wait and see what transpires :wink:
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