Sunday, July 21, 2013

Let’s hear it for CMOS sensors


I’ve written extensively on the CCD versus CMOS sensor issue, (“Why CCD sensors will become obsolete” will get you there, or just search for posts labeled “CMOS”) but I’ve recently learned of another CMOS advantage.

CMOS sensors, by virtue of their architecture, consume less power than equivalent CCD’s. Less power means less heat, and if you’ve been following along, (“Dealing with camera noise”) you’ll know that noise is bad.

So in principle, and I’ve yet to actually test this hypothesis, all other things being equal, images from a CMOS sensor will exhibit less variation in grayscale values than images from a CCD. I wonder if that means CMOS sensors perform better in high temperature environments?

Would anyone care to comment?

1 comment:

Zhenyu said...

From my very limited experience, the industrial CMOS and CCD cameras that I can put my hands on seem to have similar thermal properties.

I suspect that the CMOS/CCD array itself is not the dominant heat source of an industrial camera, because the integration time is usually very small compared to image read out time. But I do not have evidence at hand to prove or disprove it.