Why aren't there true large-format digital sensors, and do any exist?
Asked 7/26/2017
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Digital cameras range from tiny phone sensors up to medium format, but we rarely see anything that could be called true large format (roughly 50×80mm and larger). Why haven't manufacturers made single-shot large-format digital sensors for cameras like 4×5 or 8×10? Are there technical or manufacturing limits, and are there any large-format digital options in commercial or industrial use?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
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It depends on how you define camera. In a sense, digital large format does exist, just not exactly in the way we might expect.
There are commercial products called 'Digital Scanning Backs' that fit medium and large format cameras.
Instead of a full grid that can be exposed from one side to the other very quickly via a focal plane shutter, they have one line per color that moves from one side to the other as the image from the lens is continuously projected on the camera's focal plane.
Before we say, "That's not a camera, that's a scanner," let's keep these things in mind:
- They are still a LOT faster than the earliest cameras from the first half of the 19th century. They can be, and sometimes are, used to image three dimensional scenes out in the 'real world'. They can capture a scene at very high resolution in times comparable to a 'gigapan' setup.
- They use conventional view cameras with photographic lenses to project an image onto the camera's back focal plane. Flatbed scanners, in contrast, use microlenses directly in front of the scanning lines.
- Conventional film and digital cameras with focal plane shutters expose the image from one side of the frame to the other (or top to bottom). A digital scanning back is much like a DSLR taking an image at 1/8000 second where a very narrow slit passes across the surface of the sensor in about 1/300 second. It's just that the scanning back does it in super slo-mo.
- Scanning backs avoid the disadvantages inherent in using a Bayer-masked sensor.
They're often used for high end art reproduction. But they are also used to image static scenes.
The reason digital cameras with Bayer masked grid arrays don't exist in large format sizes is primarily one of cost. It's not just that a sensor 10X as large costs 10X as much. Such a sensor would cost many more times that! The smaller a sensor is, the more potential chips can be made from a standardized silicon wafer. But there are always errors in the billions of transistors on such a wafer. If I can cut 100 chips from a wafer and there are 15 errors, at most I lose 15 chips and can still use 85 of them. Chances are good that at least a few chips will have more than one error and I may get 87-88 usable chips. If I'm only cutting the wafer into 4 pieces, things get a little more difficult. If there are an average of 15 errors per wafer, I might have to go through a stack of several blank wafers to get a single usable chip from them!
For more about silicon wafer utilization, please see:
Why does increasing sensor size necessarily lead to lower silicon wafer utilization?
Why did camera manufacturers create crop sensor cameras?
What limits the size of digital imaging sensors?
Where does the price premium of full-frame come from?
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
9y ago
0
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True large-format digital does exist in limited forms, but not as common single-shot sensors like smaller digital cameras use.
One reason is manufacturing: image sensors are made on round silicon wafers, so very large chips become difficult and expensive to produce, with lower yields as size increases. Film was much easier to scale up—making a larger sheet mainly meant coating and cutting more emulsion.
Because of that, digital large format has mostly appeared as niche solutions such as scanning backs, which capture the image by moving sensor lines across the image plane. These can be used on medium- and large-format cameras, but they are slower and more specialized than conventional sensors.
There have also been prototype or development-stage very large digital cameras, but they are extremely expensive and not mainstream products.
In practice, digital photography has largely topped out around medium format for general commercial use. Large-format camera systems and lenses still exist, but they are often paired with smaller digital backs rather than true 4×5 or 8×10 single-shot sensors.
So the short answer is: yes, large-format digital exists in niche forms, but the cost and fabrication limits of very large sensors are why it is rare.
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