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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

What a strange story, basically "Oh gee, we've created a sensor that is better than all other sensors using the material that everyone thinks is a super material" followed by "If the industry chooses to adopt his design, Wang said it could lead to cheaper, lighter cameras with longer battery lives for all."

Really? Ok so if you really create a sensor with a 1000x the light gathering capacity of CMOS sensors and a commensurate 1000x reduced sensitivity to noise, and if it can be manufactured in volume, why wouldn't someone build a camera with it? So why the 'If' in that last paragraph?

This guy published a paper two years ago [1] on creating light cavities in Graphene, This is the paper that they article is working from [2] apparently.

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11468-011-9260-1

[2] http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/abs/ncomms2830.ht...

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From a different source:

"In reality, though, and contrary to some big-name publications, this graphene sensor isn’t going to replace the silicon sensor in your camera. Graphene is still incredibly hard to work with on a commercial scale (here the researchers are still mechanically exfoliating graphene and placing it on a silicon substrate with tweezers), and there’s no indication that this method would ever scale up. What is far more likely is that these graphene photodetectors might be used in optoelectronics, where optical and electronic components are squeezed into the same system/chip, or in enabling faster fiber-optic networks."

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/157082-graphene-sensor-is...

If it's possible to do a manufacturing process by hand with tweezers, I'll bet it's possible to invent a machine that does the same process faster and at scale.

Yeah, that also struck me as very odd.

Assuming all the other claims are true, my best explanation is that this guy's research is coming out of left field, and so he is not very familiar with how the industry works, and so he can't be certain of anything when it comes to how his research will be used.

That sort of caution is very typical scientist-speak.

I realize that we hear a lot in the media from scientists who do not speak in this cautious way - they get publicity precisely because they are (among the minority) willing to make bold claims about future applications of their research.

Hedging his speech. There could be potential hangups he hasn't mentioned or just doesn't know about, for example.

To accomodate the 1000x more sensitive sensor you will need a really fast shutter speed - maybe something like 1/1000000 of a second. Because shutters are mechanical devices, it might be difficult to achieve this without another leap in engineering. I am assuming that we cannot do much with the lenses.

Electronic shutter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_(photography)#Electroni...

Thanks! I wasn't aware of these electronic shutters.

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