I don't think you can generalize very much about sensors or their
design. The CMOS advantage seems to be the ability to put noise
reduction on the sensor itself. The CCD is inherently quieter without
noise reduction because of the significantly higher fill factor, the
actual percentage of the pixel pitch that is covered with light
sensitive material. A major goal of the CMOS designs used by Nikon
are primarily to get the data off the sensor so that they can get 8
frames per second. Some of that high speed design was used on the CCD
in the D200 CCD which has 5 fps and a quieter sensor than the CMOS in
the D2X. The FujiFilm F10 and F11 cameras use CCD designs and are
several stops quieter in the digital noise department than the
competition. It is the cleverness of execution that counts.
Back in the heyday of gull wing MB race cars their swing axles got
much more respect than the ones in VWs taking a tumble off a curved
road.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On Jan 27, 2006, at 11:11 PM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
>
> The early CMOS sensors were not used because they were noisy and
> crude compared to CCD's. Things have changed and the ones used in the
> Canon are useable at 1600 ISO which can't be claimed sensibly by
> others. The high end Nikon pro bodies also use CMOS.
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