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He's a brilliant kid, but also boasting about things he has no clue about. We built 120db cameras into series production cars since 2005. Took one guy being brilliant in FPGAs and me implementing HDR tonemapping it down for processing on those small CPUs we had back then.

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120 dB of dynamic range -- meaning one pixel is ~20 bits hotter than the one next to it -- sounds pretty amazing. I had no idea modern image sensors were capable of anything close to that. Is that the correct interpretation of "dynamic range" in this context, or is there a more specialized definition that leave some room for handwaving?

The last time I messed around with digitizing video, you got 8 bits of each R/G/B component and you were happy about it.

Your interpretation is correct. You need multiple exposures or so called "partial resets" for high dynamic imagers. Having an ADC with more than 8 bit should be accompanied with proper gain and offset compensation, minimum for the columns. If you search for those keywords, you can find articles like https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4621212

The trick is that you get some log like sensitivity curve and not a linear one. This is ok for almost all applications, since you don't need the super fine greyvalue resolution in bright areas.

he's like 32

Biologically.

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