Most people who are interested in cameras have heard of the acronyms CCD and CMOS, but let’s be honest – there are those who are interested in cameras and don’t have the slightest idea what CCD, CMOS , or super CCD are. To put it simply, these are different kind of sensors that make it possible for you to take pictures, each working differently. The CCD sensor, also known as charge-coupled device sensor is known to provide more quality while the CMOS one performs very good and is cheaper, but lacks the performance for darker pictures. There is also the super CCD which provides more resolutions than the usual CCD. Let us see what super CCD has to offer.
The super CCD sensor
The super CCD was introduced by Fujifilm and it has been developing since 1999. The standard CCD sensor uses rectangular photodiodes (pixels), while the new super CCD uses the octagonal photodiodes and therefore you can have higher vertical and horizontal resolution. The CCD sensor itself works so that it catches light in a photo sensor, and then holds it in a form of an electrical charge, which is then processed into a read-out register, then it goes to an amplifier and after this step is finished it goes into a converter which makes the signal digital. The super CCD sensor makes it possible for the images to be clearer, have better color and sharpness too.
Honeycomb design
The new pixels in the super CCD sensor aren’t rectangular but octagonal, making them look like a honeycomb. The pixels are rotated for 45° and by doing this, the sensitivity is increased, the dynamic is much wider and the colors are more lifelike. This design also enables the pixels to be nearer to each other, so the density is also greater. The super CCD therefore allows for better quality pictures – as an example, a 1.3 megapixel super CCD will give a picture of the same quality as a normal CCD with 2 megapixels.
Different kinds of super CCD
The super CCD has different subtypes, and some of them include the HR and the SR type, which were introduced in 2003, and in September 2008, after they released the 7th generation of the super CCD was introduced, they announced the super CCD EXR. The first two types, the HR and SR, represent high resolution and high quality types. Their differences are in the build of the diodes – they both have 2 photodiodes per photosite, one is bigger and the other one is smaller. The bigger one is more sensitive to light and the smaller one is less sensitive. Combined, they actually take two pictures, the bigger one takes a lighter picture and the smaller one a darker picture and then they are combined into one image, and this image has more color and vibrance to it. The announced EXR version should combine the high resolution and high quality from both HR and SR into one device.
