After all the Nobel attention the CCD has gotten in the past week, it seems apropos to take a look at some new developments in sensor technology. A team of Dutch scientists have designed a sensor that has the potential to lower the price of digital cameras while boosting image quality.

The inventors hail from the Technical University at Deleft and are headed up by Edoardo Charbon.  They have dubbed the sensor "gigavision" and claim that it excels at snapping photos in both high and low light situations, an area in which digital cameras have traditionally struggled.

Essentially, gigavision is a memory chip without the black casing. When the chip is exposed to light it reacts similarly to a CCD, storing the amount of photons that hit its cells. In the past, this would be disastrous as it would erase the chip's memory, but in the context of a digital camera it is a cheap and powerful sensor.

 So all this boils down to the fact that a gigavision chip the same size as a CMOS has 100 times as many light capturing cells. The result? Better images, smaller size and cheaper production. Can anyone say pimp my cell phone camera?

(image from wikimedia commons)