Can any camera capture UV, visible, and near-infrared in a single shot?
Asked 9/13/2017
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Is there a commercially available camera or image sensor that can record ultraviolet (UV), visible light, and near-infrared (NIR) all at once in a single exposure, rather than taking separate filtered shots and combining them later?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
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Depending on your definition of "commercial availability" (it is pretty unavailable to me) Phase One Achromatic might fit the description.
One more comment: the relative intensity / sensor sensitivity (it ends up the same) of visible and invisible light differs greatly. Getting the exposure in invisible light right is more art than science (in my experience - near UV is about about 4 stops off, and near IR about 5, but a lot of bracketing is required).
Using filters and separating the three (UV, visible, IR) shots allows for longer times / wider aperture for the invisible light ones. Shooting with the same settings as for visible light would result in a dark image.
Combining all three spectrums in one image would in most cases lead to the visible light image "crowding out" the two invisible ones.
Originally by user62463. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user62463
8y ago
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Generally, not in a practical consumer-camera sense. Most digital cameras’ sensors have some native sensitivity into near-IR and a little UV, but they include filters specifically to block most of that so color photos look normal. Modified cameras can capture more IR/UV, and specialized monochrome systems such as achromatic technical cameras may get closer, but that is not the same as cleanly separating UV, visible, and NIR into one normal photo.
The main problem is capture and balance: visible light is much stronger and easier to record than UV or NIR, so in one exposure the visible image tends to dominate unless you use filters or very carefully controlled lighting/exposure. Separate filtered captures are commonly used because UV and IR often need very different exposure settings.
There are also optical issues: different wavelengths focus at different planes, so getting UV, visible, and IR all sharply focused at once is difficult.
So the practical answer is: standard cameras can sometimes detect parts of these ranges, especially if modified, but a true one-shot UV + visible + NIR capture is generally a specialized scientific/imaging task rather than a normal commercially available photography feature.
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