New Kodak sensors

[gregbradley]

I was looking at the Kodak Sensor Solutions website last night and see they have some new sensors available now.

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/busin...?pq-path=14424

Of interest is the KAI29050 29mp 44mm diagonal (the same as an STL11 camera diagonal). The KAF16803 requires 52mm diagonal corrected illuminated circle from your optics. No QE data there though. I wonder what its QE is.

Could be a good chip for astrowork.

Also Kodak are finally selling their new one shot colour chips with a different microlense - I think its LRGB instead of RGGB (Bayer matrix).

Its supposed to be almost as sensitive as Monochrome.

This could be great for one shot colour astro cameras and fill the gap between DSLR and monochrome imaging by simplifying it to one shot colour that has performance not too far off monochrome?

A FLI Proline with a 29mp chip could be interesting. I am used to square images now. I wonder if I could go back to rectangular images again??

Greg.

[Bassnut (Fred)]

mm, the KAI29050 has a well depth of only 20Ke, that doesnt sound good.

[gregbradley]

Yeah I noticed that. Not sure if that is the end of the world as the KAF8300 also has a well depth of 20,000 electrons and it works well. You just have to be careful about getting fat bright stars from 10 minute exposures. Perhaps a shorter exposure time. Still it'd be nice to have that larger like the 16803 which is about 100,000 electrons or more.

Greg.

[Bassnut (Fred)]

It would have to be priced at less than the price of the 16803s 100Ke to be of interest for astro. 20ke is about a raw 14bit with fairly small 5.5um pixels. Sufficient for a DSLR, would be awesome for that.

Seems we are heading for a 2 class astro cam market, starting with the 8300 and now perhaps the KAI29050. Cheaper low performance huge MP sensors (although the new bayer layout looks like QE is improving) and traditional astro CDs, which havent changed that much in performance in the last few years. Its a good thing, a choice of super hi res for easier targets and carefull capture, or the usual hi-perforamce CCDs.

Seems large well depth/hi-Qe/large pixel chips have pretty much reached a brick wall, without going to unmanagable sizes for commercially available optics.

[gregbradley]

It certainly seems that way Fred. Richard Crisp who is a professional in the industry says there is exciting work being done on Scientific CMOS chips. That seems to be the area where the development is occurring.

Greg.