Panasonic Develops 123dB Wide-Dynamic-Range Image Sensor

> 2. 123dB simultaneous-capture wide dynamic range (that is 100x wider than that of common silicon image sensors*3), while maintaining the conventional chip size, due to our original " simultaneous-capture structure ".

I'd like to see a concrete product. Even if the dynamic range data is right, there might be catches marketing conveniently forgot to mention.

123 dB, so 20.4 stops? 100x corresponds to 6.6 stops. Most consumer level DSLRs have about 12-15 stops, so the math is about right.

If it's really this wide dynamic range, it's pretty trivial to get a good exposure with a camera with this sensor in. At least it's going to be hard to burn details short of pointing this at a bright light source, such as the sun.

To understand what this means on a concrete level, here's a EV (stop) value table with typical (lighting) scenes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value#Tabulated_expos...

That is ingenious. By having alternating small and large photosensitive areas coupled to fixed size charge storage devices, you get high and low sensitivity pixels with high commonality.

In theory you could have an exponential series to have even more dynamic range.

Or alternatively, if you use powers of two for the sizes, you could use 1-bit sensors, though you probably couldn't do a high bit depth that way. But it'd be extremely fast, as there wouldn't need to be a real A/D conversion. Maybe concentric pixels of varying sizes...