From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Working with image sensors in low light

Working with image sensors in low light

From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Working with image sensors in low light

So the story goes that one fall day, two engineers at Bell Labs, George Smith and Willard Boyle, spent about an hour sketching out an idea for a new type of semiconductor that could be used as computer memory, you know, as one does on a nice fall day. Anyway, they thought that the semiconductor could also be used to create a video camera that didn't require vacuum tubes. In that hour, the two men created the plan for the charged coupled device, or CCD chip. Now, we tend to think of digital cameras as a fairly new technology, but that fall day that I am talking about was in October of 1969. Within a year, Bell Labs had created a video camera using Smith and Boyle's new semiconductor. Their idea was to create a very simple device that could be used in a video telephone, but they soon had created a camera that was good enough for broadcast TV work. It wasn't until the late 1990s though that the quality from these image sensors had gotten good enough for still photography work. A still…

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