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."<p>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 <i>wouldn't</i> someone build a camera with it? So why the 'If' in that last paragraph?<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11468-011-9260-1" rel="nofollow">http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11468-011-9260-1</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/abs/ncomms2830.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/abs/ncomms2830.ht...</a>
"1000 times more sensitive"<p>What does that even mean?<p>Even 10 times higher quantum efficiency shooting wide open on optical band targets would be physically impossible.<p>On top of that, 'Eliminates need for flash' is not a great title - most people who care about photography don't use flash much for direct illumination; very flat targets, indirect illumination, close-range zoomed in macro shots, and filling in a dark foreground are the exceptions. Cell phone shots look like cell phone shots in part 1) because they compensate for the tiny sensor with crappy LEDs, not even proper xenon bulbs, but mainly 2) because a 1/4" class sensor can only offer 1/3 the SNR of a cheap point & shoot 1/2.3" class sensor on a good day, for the same level of illumination: they <i>need</i> the flash to work, and so you get flash-based shots, which usually look horrible because of the distinctive way it lights the scene.
Here's the PDF version of the paper, <a href="http://cdpt.ntu.edu.sg/Documents/ncomms%204%201811.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cdpt.ntu.edu.sg/Documents/ncomms%204%201811.pdf</a><p>This is very exciting and has multiple uses:<p>1 - drastic improvement to P&S and mobile photography (largest source of photos now).
Most of these photos at night suffer from noise and harsh flashes and significant redeye<p>2 - improving dynamic range in SLR by providing two photodiodes per each pixel. One for high sensitivity (large) and one for low sensitivity to preserve highlights.<p>3 - providing a great boost to the micro 4/3 systems. The 4/3 makes a great portable platform (size, weight, etc.) however suffers from tremendous shadow noise and as such make it less ideal as a replacement for full-frame (35mm sensors ) SLRs.<p>4 - might give a new life to Lytro and similar systems. It would allow them to provide higher resolutions images to make them appealing to more demanding phitographers.<p>5 - worst nightmare for people concerned with government intrusion. It enables cameras to operate in dark streets or other places and keep people under constant watch-day or night.
Just recall that less than ten years ago, nobody even <i>knew</i> of this material and it was only the subject of strange theoretical research at ivory tower universities.<p>Please continue to fund science. =)
The article says this new sensor is ~1000x more sensitive than the sensors in today's cameras. Comparing it with the extremetech article linked by <i>chaz</i>, it's clear what's happened:<p>The sensor is <i>not</i> ~1000x more sensitive than the sensors in today's cameras. It's ~1000x more sensitive than <i>previous graphene sensors</i>.<p>(And the 1000x improvement is when you measure amps of current generated per watt of incident light, which isn't necessarily the best measure of how well the sensor will actually perform.)
Might benefit the casual snapshot photographer, but pros use flash more for fill-in lighting when there are sharp shadows and for freezing motion e.g. in sports photography.
Sounds interesting although I suspect it's the fact that the sensor uses graphene that makes this a news item.<p>I wonder how fast a sensor like this would be. If it's so sensitive I'm guessing that you can build a super-fast camera, which is something engineers are always looking for. For our high-speed applications in the microsecond exposure time it's hard to get enough light and fast enough shuttering. Even if this thing isn't going to replace CMOS and CCD it could be interesting for high speed metrology.
If it gathers light in the infrared spectrum, how is noise eliminated? Ambient room temperature is an infrared-peak blackbody. I'd like to see more on the filtering that has to go into images taken with such a sensor.