Digital Sensor Is Said to Match Quality of Film
by John Markoff for the New York Times

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SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10 — If Carver Mead is right, photographic film is an endangered species.

Dr. Mead, who is 67, was a pioneer of the modern computer chip industry in the 1970's. But he has never stopped inventing. And on Monday his Silicon Valley start-up, Foveon, plans to begin shipping a new type of digital image sensor that outside experts agree is the first to match or surpass the photographic capabilities of 35-millimeter film.

The Associated Press Carver Mead, founder of Foveon.

The company's sensor chip is being used in a single-lens reflex camera that Sigma, a Japanese camera and lens maker, plans to begin selling for about $3,000 later this month. A second generation of Foveon's sensors is scheduled for shipping this fall and, if other camera makers embrace it, could become available early next year in more popular brands of digital cameras selling for less than $1,000.

The first new sensor the company is now shipping is made by National Semiconductor (news/quote) and will have approximately 3.53 million pixels. Such a resolution would put the device in the middle of the market for digital image sensor chips used in digital still and video cameras. Because of the new technology's color-capturing technique, however, its designers say it is actually comparable to existing sensors with 7 million pixels that are currently available only in cameras costing $6,000 or more.

"It will completely transform the industry," George Gilder, an economist and an information industry analyst, said of Foveon's sensor.

Executives at Eastman Kodak (news/quote), one of the largest makers of both consumer and professional digital cameras, say they have talked with Foveon about possibly using the company's sensors in at least one part of the Kodak product line.

"We've been very aware of what they're doing and monitoring their progress," said Madhav Mehra, manager of Kodak's professional digital-capture group. "Our contention is that if this technology gets proven out, it's very significant."

If Foveon is to realize its goal of becoming a dominant player in the market for digital image sensors, the company will need to attract manufacturers like Kodak. The sensor market is currently dominated by consumer electronics giants like Sony (news/quote) and the big European chip maker ST Microelectronics, which have invested billions of dollars in their own technologies.

"I have no doubts this is a great technology," said Chris Chute, a senior analyst at the International Data Corporation, a research house. "The rub is that the market has heavily entrenched competitors. The No. 1 digital camera manufacturer in the world is Sony. They're the 5,000- pound gorilla compared with little Foveon."

Still, photography experts say Foveon's approach to sensors could be the most significant breakthrough in digital photography since the original black-and-white sensor was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1969. Foveon's sensor significantly simplifies the process of capturing a digital image and avoids most of the color aberrations that have plagued digital photography.

The current crop of digital sensors capture light using a mosaic of red, green and blue filters that limit color information to one color per picture element, or pixel, on the sensor surface. The technique requires the chip to perform as many as 100 calculations per pixel to approximate the color, which can cause inaccuracies. The limitations also sacrifice picture resolution and limit the sensor's ability to operate in low light.

"Most digital cameras don't do a good job of giving you the colors you actually see," Dr. Mead said.

Foveon's sensor, rather than break images into separate colors and distribute them among separate pixels, captures color by measuring how deeply photons of light penetrate the surface of the imaging material. Not only is there higher resolution from a given number of pixels, but there is less loss of light and less need for the correcting calculations that can distort the image.

"There is no longer any need to use film," Dr. Mead said.

With more than a billion film cameras in the world, conventional photography is unlikely to disappear soon, in the view of Don Franz, publisher of the trade publication Photo Imaging News. But Mr. Franz notes that the digital camera market is growing fast, with about 8 million digital cameras sold in the United States last year and an additional 10 million internationally, for a global market valued at about $8.6 billion

Alexis Gerard, publisher of The Future Image Report, a newsletter that tracks the digital photography market, said the industry was at "a crossover point" in terms of digital technology and Foveon's technology could help speed the transition. "Having a sensor that measures all three colors at every element at full exposure has been the engineering holy grail," Ms. Gerard said.

Industry experts say that one of the most intriguing aspects of the Foveon sensors is that they might allow for a hybrid digital camera that performs equally well for both video and still photography. Currently, the markets for still and video digital cameras are separate because most sensors cannot easily adjust from high resolution for still pictures to lower resolution for moving images.

Foveon's new sensor technology, which the company calls X3, is a departure from the two types of image sensors that have proliferated in a wide range of consumer products: CMOS, which is pronounced SEE- moss and stands for complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, and a more complex variety called C.C.D., for charged coupled device.

Two years ago, Foveon was concentrating on expensive, professional cameras based on CMOS sensors but abandoned them after coming up with the X3 approach.

Foveon is being deliberately vague about its manufacturing methods but says its design greatly reduces the cost of making sensors and could create an opening for American chip makers in the digital-sensing field. National Semiconductor, one of Silicon Valley's oldest chip companies and the maker of Foveon's current sensors, is an investor in Foveon.

Brian L. Halla, National Semiconductor's chief executive, is optimistic but does not assume it will be easy to gain ground on the entrenched players. "Sony has invested in a brand new C.C.D. FAB, and they could fight this technology by driving price down," Mr. Halla said. A FAB is a chip-fabrication plant.

Dr. Mead, who founded Foveon in Santa Clara, Calif., in 1997, was a longtime physicist at the California Institute of Technology before his retirement two years ago. In the 1970's he pioneered design techniques that helped form the basis for the modern semiconductor industry — most notably, a process known as very large system integration, or V.L.S.I., which made it possible to imprint tens of thousands of transistors on a single silicon chip.

Dr. Mead was a co-founder of Synaptics, the dominant maker of computer touchpads. He also helped start Impinge, a maker of analog semiconductor technology, and Sonic Innovations (news/quote), a maker of hearing aids.

"Carver's strength is his clever understanding of physics," said Carlo Sequin, an electrical engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who was the co- inventor of the digital video camera at Bell Labs in 1973. "He comes up with fundamental shortcuts to make things simple again."

Date of this news: year 2002.

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