On Fri, 26 Feb 1999 05:55:25 -0800, William Sommerwerck <williams@xxxxxxxxxx>
jammed all night, and by sunrise was overheard remarking:
era of silver-film quality.
>
> By the way, Kodak started work on electronic and digital imaging systems as
> early as 1970. (Kodak and Polaroid were the first companies to introduce 8mm
> video in the US.) Even 30 years ago, they could see "the handwriting on the
> wall."
Yup. Pretty much every film company and most camera companies have been
involved in this more recently, but Kodak started early. It's a survival
move -- once you see where this will ultimately wind up, it's pretty
clear that digital will overtake silver oxide at some point among the
masses. If you make much of your money selling film to those masses, you
better figure out something else to sell them.
> The big CCD chip in the DCS 560 is a Kodak product. (So why does the
> camera cost so much?)
[a] Because it can.
[b] You're paying for all the Kodak film you're not buying :-)
> Moore's Law doesn't apply very well to CCD chips, because you cannot make the
> cells arbitrarily smaller without degrading the chip's performance.
However, as I pointed out in an earlier post, at least for the last two
years in the under-$1000 range, we've done significantly better than
Moore's law would suggest.
Alternate technologies, such as CMOS sensors, will probably carry an
increasing load of digital imaginging as they're improved in quality. You
also have the advantage on such a device of being able to integrate
processing and memory on the same device.
> (This is also true of transistors, but the transistor has to be much, much
> smaller
> before the Fundamental Laws of the Universe start interfering.)
And the question of which laws are likely to actually put a stop to
things change over time, as we get closer to the top of one hill and thus
have a better view of what's next. Twenty years ago there were supposed
problems with going sub-micron, ten years ago folks were saying that
things like the quantum tunneling effect would stop anyone from getting
very close to 0.1 micron (mass production is running today at 0.18
micron, including some memory chips, the latest PowerPC CPUs, and
probably Intel's next die shrink for their mainstream CPUs). Now various
companies are working on quantum transistors that actually use tunneling
effects, which might ultimately lead to another switchover, as the
industry switched over from NMOS to CMOS in the 80s (primarily due to
heat problems with too many devices on a chip at once). But I digress...
--
Dave Haynie | V.P. Technology, Met@box Infonet, AG | http://www.metabox.de
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