Russell,

On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 02:08:13 +1300, Russell McMahon wrote:

> As it's not April-fools day the following may tell about new and 
> potentially vast advances in sensors for cameras - so significant as 
> to promise orders of magnitude gains in several areas.
> 
>         http://www.dpreview.com/news/0512/05121201new_chips.asp
> 
> These include far lower current drain (< 1 nano-Watt/pixel or about 50 
> times better than current best), 100 times better dynamic range than 
> usual (100,000:1 vs 1000:1 typical) (!) (even in the prototypes), per 
> sensor cell Sigma Delta converters (!), and en situ compression 
> assistance by arranging cells non linearly to optimise computation of 
> a cosine transformation.

And having achieved the saving in power to produce the picture, they are then talking about using radio to 
transmit it!  Isn't that a bit like striving to reduce the weight of the label on a hammer handle?  :-)  

Somehow a battery-powered security camera which transmits its pictures by radio doesn't sound terribly viable 
to me.  Now if they used parasitic power from an Ethernet cable, thus doing away with the need for PoE, then I 
can see the benefit.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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