largesense: digital 8x10 large format

Solarflare · Feb 23, 2015

You clearly complained, did you not ?

And I think it was just a harmless joke.

And yes, it will have EVF, WiFi, and 4K Video, or at least thats the plan.

tirediron · Feb 23, 2015

I don't see any option for rear movement and what about power? If this thing needs a lot of power, it's not going to be much good as a landscape camera; it's already too big and bulky. I could definitely get interested in a 4x5 version, but this looks just a little too gimmicky to me.

photoguy99 · Feb 23, 2015

Version 1 is usually pretty rough. It's a victory if you can make it sellable at all.

I am wildly curious about how they're fabricating a sensor that big. It's obviously not a single slice of semiconductor, they're tiling... something.

unpopular · Feb 24, 2015

photoguy99 said:
Version 1 is usually pretty rough. It's a victory if you can make it sellable at all.

I am wildly curious about how they're fabricating a sensor that big. It's obviously not a single slice of semiconductor, they're tiling... something.

There was an article a number of years ago about some rich dude that commissioned the fabrication of a custom 8x10" sensor because they "didn't make polaroid anymore". WIRED magazine said it "cost as much as a large house".

I am not sure what technique they used for that. I suppose it's POSSIBLE that it's a single sheet of silicon, since they cut down the wafer to make multiple chips, and wafers can be up to 12" in diameter (would this even fit the 9x11" sensor?)

But this also seems improbable. If there was a problem with the sensor, then the entire wafer would have to be discarded. I've heard that imaging sensors are prone to manufacturing problems.

The fact that it's 9x11 and not 8x10 might say something?

Solarflare · Feb 24, 2015

I wondered this too, but I cant say anything about how they got the sensor. I just came across the webside by pure chance - I was simply googling for large format, and there it was. Cant find any secondardy source about this project yet, and cant find anything about how they actually produced this sensor on the website itself.

For all I know, theres been speculation going on to change the way how sensors are produced for really large formats. Right now what the companies do for any chip is using an huge and extremely expensive lens to project an image on the chip, which has been previously treated with photosensitive materials, then work on the resulting structure. One could however also use a more scanner like technology, so instead of producing the full image, one moves over the chip with a scanner line, only always projecting a small part of the whole structure on the photosensitive material. This might be beneficial for really large sensors and result in much smaller cost for such a production machine, and making it feasible to produce larger sensors in one piece. The production itself would be slower this way, of course, but thats not so important since the demand for medium format sensors is also quite low.

photoguy99 · Feb 24, 2015

The fact that it's 9x11 instead of 8x10 tells us -- if we assume that they were looking for the smallest thing at least as big as 8x10 -- that they're using submodules more than 1 inch in size. There's some math you hack around with.

Given that 512x640 is a standard size for a certain kind of thing, I am going to guess that this thing is a 6x6 array of 640x512 sensor modules. Presumably they hunted around for something that sensed in the visible light spectrum that could be packed in very closely. Googling around for the specifics doesn't turn up anything exact, but there's a lot of this sort of thing out there.

pixmedic · Feb 24, 2015

Solarflare said:
You clearly complained, did you not ?

And I think it was just a harmless joke.

And yes, it will have EVF, WiFi, and 4K Video, or at least thats the plan.

no. I did not.
you are wrong. again.
as i clearly stated before.
I just thought it was funny.
it wasn't anger. it wasn't a complaint.
it was an observation. about something i found amusing.

Solarflare · Feb 28, 2015

Okay.

Still no secondary source about this camera, I'm really curious how they make the sensor and what the end user prices will be.

rhlounsbury · Dec 19, 2016

I would dearly love to have the option of a large format (4x5 or larger) digital back to mount on my Sinar. But a few questions come to mind since LargeSense has been very sparing on technical details...

This is billed as a single-shot device, not a scanning back. The "rolling shutter" might refer to a method that makes it possible to stitch together a single image from a tiled array of smaller sensors which are moved during the exposure to capture all parts of the image. That would make sense and give me hope that this could really happen.

A single-chip sensor seems unlikely simply on the basis of development cost. The camera is billed as 9x11, which could not be fabricated on a standard 300mm silicon wafer... that would handle a maximum sensor size of about 8.3" square. It would require a 450mm wafer, which would support up to a bit over 12" square. The projected cost for a raw wafer of this size is somewhere between $4,000 to $6,000. This is before you etch on any circuits and before you trash the finished circuits that have defects. A previous poster referred to Mitchell Feinberg's 8x10 custom digital back as costing as much as a modest house; that may be an optimistic guideline.

I wish LargeSense great success, and hope they will post a few clues about their technology. Availability and price information would also be welcome. Monochrome? Great! And if they start out with limited pixels... well, you have to start somewhere.

Bob

unpopular · Dec 19, 2016

two years later, and the LargeSense has gone the way of the hoverboard.

480sparky · Dec 20, 2016

unpopular said:
two years later, and the LargeSense has gone the way of the hoverboard.

They catch on fire?

greybeard · Dec 20, 2016

12 mp on an 8x10 sensor? Those are some seriously large pixels that should be able to work in ANY light and, should make up for the very slow 8x10 format lenses that are available. It might be fun to play around with.

waday · Dec 20, 2016

unpopular said:
two years later, and the LargeSense has gone the way of the hoverboard.

Have you visited their site lately? It seems like they're somewhat active, with a blog post in October of this year.

That said, given the estimated price of $99,000, I'm assuming not many will be able to afford it.