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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
Hi,
Can anyone shed any light on how this new sensor works? Take, for example, the 9MP one found on their E900 and S9000 (or S9500) cameras. Fuji says this is 9 million effective pixels, and 9 million recorded pixels, therefore there is no interpolation (such as there was on their 4th generation Super CCD HR sensors.) But how can there not be interpolation? The sensor is still tilted at 45 degrees to the horizontal, so how can you produce 9 MP in a horizontal/vertical orientation without interpolating and/or resampling? Clint |
#2
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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
Clint Kirk wrote:
Hi, Can anyone shed any light on how this new sensor works? Take, for example, the 9MP one found on their E900 and S9000 (or S9500) cameras. Fuji says this is 9 million effective pixels, and 9 million recorded pixels, therefore there is no interpolation (such as there was on their 4th generation Super CCD HR sensors.) But how can there not be interpolation? The sensor is still tilted at 45 degrees to the horizontal, so how can you produce 9 MP in a horizontal/vertical orientation without interpolating and/or resampling? Every bayer sensor does interpolation of colour information, where every pixel in the resulting image is interpolated out of the colour information in that and surrounding pixels on the sensor. Fuji's Super CCD does the same, the only difference being that the final pixel doesn't have a direct positional relationship with 1 individual pixel on the sensor. This is why previous SCCD's cameras had their standard resolution and also a double resolution. In the double resolution mode, each pixel was either interpolated or had a direct relationship with an individual pixel. The end result is that for many images, an increase in perceived resolution can be gained. Clint |
#3
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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
On 16 Jan 2006 02:36:15 -0800, Clint Kirk wrote:
Can anyone shed any light on how this new sensor works? Take, for example, the 9MP one found on their E900 and S9000 (or S9500) cameras. Fuji says this is 9 million effective pixels, and 9 million recorded pixels, therefore there is no interpolation (such as there was on their 4th generation Super CCD HR sensors.) But how can there not be interpolation? The sensor is still tilted at 45 degrees to the horizontal, so how can you produce 9 MP in a horizontal/vertical orientation without interpolating and/or resampling? I can't shed much light on how Fuji's sensors work, but there's interpolation and there's interpolation. In fact there needs to be interpolation in *all* Bayer sensors, but that's of a different kind. What Fuji means is that with their earlier generation Super CCD sensors, you could take a particular one having, say, 6 million actual pixels and have the camera set to save image files containing only 6mp. Or you could enable interpolation which would then create 12mp image files. Naturally, the file size would double, and it wouldn't come close to providing the detail that a true 12mp sensor would. According to reviews, it did help slightly, maybe being equivalent to a 6.3mp sensor, but the amount of improvement was dependent on the subject matter. I recall some reviewers saying that it helped least when dealing with horizontal and vertical linear objects and did better when they were at some intermediate angle. If the E900 and S9000/S9500 used the same (or similar) 9mp sensors and created interpolated output files, they would be twice as large, containing 18 million interpolated pixels, which few people would find worth dealing with, cutting in half the number of pictures you could store on flash cards, and slowing the operation of photo editing on the computer. Sometimes enormously so, if the computer's memory resources are borderline . . . |
#4
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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
Clint Kirk wrote: Hi, Can anyone shed any light on how this new sensor works? Take, for example, the 9MP one found on their E900 and S9000 (or S9500) cameras. Fuji says this is 9 million effective pixels, and 9 million recorded pixels, therefore there is no interpolation (such as there was on their 4th generation Super CCD HR sensors.) But how can there not be interpolation? The sensor is still tilted at 45 degrees to the horizontal, so how can you produce 9 MP in a horizontal/vertical orientation without interpolating and/or resampling? Clint I am more interested in knowing what have they done in the newer 1/1.7" Super HR CCD sensor used in the Fuji F10/11 that makes it such a low-noise sensor compared to other P&S cameras in its competition. - Siddhartha |
#5
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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
Thanks to everyone for the answer's, especially to Graham Fountain who
pointed out the interpolation done by all Bayer (i.e. mosaic filter) sensors. Actually, I was trying to simplify my question by assuming, for now, that the CCD was monochrome, and once that was answered I would interpolate (no pun intended) the answer to include the colour information by thinking about the effects of the mosaic filter. In the end, as Graham pointed out, all Bayer sensors interpolate anyway (they interpolate two out of the three colour values in each pixel). So, since every pixel is interpolated in all such sensors (not just Fuji's ones) then it's really not such a shame that every pixel in Fuji's new sensor is also interpolated. Is my understanding correct? Clint |
#6
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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
On 16 Jan 2006 08:42:37 -0800, "Clint Kirk"
wrote: Thanks to everyone for the answer's, especially to Graham Fountain who pointed out the interpolation done by all Bayer (i.e. mosaic filter) sensors. Actually, I was trying to simplify my question by assuming, for now, that the CCD was monochrome, and once that was answered I would interpolate (no pun intended) the answer to include the colour information by thinking about the effects of the mosaic filter. In the end, as Graham pointed out, all Bayer sensors interpolate anyway (they interpolate two out of the three colour values in each pixel). So, since every pixel is interpolated in all such sensors (not just Fuji's ones) then it's really not such a shame that every pixel in Fuji's new sensor is also interpolated. Is my understanding correct? Clint No. There's a difference between "pixel" and "color in a pixel." Bayer-filtered sensor cameras interpolate the chroma in pixels, not the pixels. In the Fuji, the actual pixels are interpolated, because the pixels in the sensor and in the final image are entirely different. There's no way the sensor's sensel layout can be made into a rectangular format without interpolating the pixels themselves. This isn't intended to be a comment or complaint about Fuji's system, just a comment that the pixels themselves are interpolated. -- Bill Funk Replace "g" with "a" funktionality.blogspot.com |
#7
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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
"Clint Kirk" writes:
Hi, Can anyone shed any light on how this new sensor works? Take, for example, the 9MP one found on their E900 and S9000 (or S9500) cameras. Fuji says this is 9 million effective pixels, and 9 million recorded pixels, therefore there is no interpolation (such as there was on their 4th generation Super CCD HR sensors.) But how can there not be interpolation? The sensor is still tilted at 45 degrees to the horizontal, so how can you produce 9 MP in a horizontal/vertical orientation without interpolating and/or resampling? In recent Fuji sensors, half the sensor locations have relatively large sensors that have good light sensitivity with high effective ISO to capture detail in shadows, and the other half are small sensors with low ISO to capture highlight detail without burning out. So a "9 MP" sensor is really 4.5 MP of high-sensitivity locations plus 4.5 MP of low-sensitivity locations. In earlier versions of this, the little low-ISO sensors were placed close to the high-ISO sensors and are probably better regarded as a pair located in one place. They were located in a rotated square grid, so (as usual with Fuji), needed interpolation to get a row/column raster for the image file without losing any resolution. So it was a 4.5 MP sensor interpolated up to 9 MP, as usual, with a nearly-coincident 4.5 MP second sensor for highlight information. The latest designs seem to place the small sensors halfway between the large ones, like the white and black squares on a checkerboard. So, at the least, each output pixel is actually located at a place where there is a sensing element on the sensor. But half of them capture only high-brightness components and the other half capture only low-brightness components, so interpolation is still necessary to produce a full dynamic range at each pixel. On the other hand, there now are 9 million separate measuring locations in a "9 MP" sensor. In theory, the sensor could have resolution equalling that of a standard 9 MP sensor with 9 million identical measuring cells, at least for the midtone portions of the image that can be handled by both the small and large cells. So it would be very interesting looking at some resolution tests. Dave |
#8
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Fuji's 5th generation Super CCD HR sensor
That's very interesting. It got me thinking what it would look like
once you've put the colour filter on top. |
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