Photography with Computers

Yesterday, in my post Photography of Computers, I wrote about photographing computers, and in particular the marvelous book Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation. Today, I'm going to take a look at computers on the other side of the lens, namely digital photography.

Eventually, the idea of digital photography was invented. This is the first digital camera, created by Kodak. Yes, the stories that Kodak was completely blindsided by digital photography are completely wrong. They could see it coming, they just couldn't do anything about it given that their expertise was in chemicals and distribution, not electronics.

As I said in my post Clayton Christensen and the Innovator's Dilemma:

The 8-pound camera that Sasson put together shot 0.01-megapixel black-and-white photos and recorded them to cassette tapes. Each photo took 23 seconds to create, and the only way to view the photos was to read the data from the tape and display it onto a standard television screen.

So this was clearly not competitive with film in any way. But it only got better. By the time it was so good that even professional photographers went digital, it was too late for Kodak: other people were the market leaders. Kodak went bankrupt. The skills required to be successful in digital photography were not chemicals and an insane distribution network that covered every supermarket, drugstore, gift shop, and park concession—in the entire world.

Digital Cameras

Once digital cameras were good enough, we were all quite happy to stop having to take our film to PhotoDriveUp to get it developed and printed. Point-and-shoot cameras were cheap, and gradually the high-end SLRs switched from film to digital as the image sensors became good enough. More on images sensors later in this post.

But the victory over film was short-lived. There was a steep runup, but in 2010, just three years after the first smartphone the decline began.

So severe has the dropoff been that by 2018 there were more interchangeable lens (DSLR) cameras sold than point-and-shoot. I suspect that their days are numbered, too, except for the teeny niche at the top for professional photographers. I've read analysis saying that the software on a high-end smartphone is so good that it more than compensates for the tiny lenses. Famously, in 2015, Sean Baker shot the movie Tangerine on smartphones (3 iPhone 5S, so primitive by 2020 standards). There have been over a dozen more since, including A-list director Steven Soderbergh's Unsane.

In almost perfect timing for this post, at the end of June I saw a BBC report Olympus quits camera business after 84 years.

The firm said that despite its best efforts, the "extremely severe digital camera market" was no longer profitable. The arrival of smartphones, which had shrunk the market for separate cameras, was one major factor, it said.

I think the first company to withdraw from the camera market, having seen the writing on the wall, was Minolta. That was back in 2006. I was sad since I had a little tiny Minolta camera at the time, that I'd used to take a lot of the photos I took when I hiked the John Muir Trail a few years earlier. It had a cunning bent light path inside the body, so all the 3X optical zoom was done without a lens protruding. It was the smallest however-many-pixels-were-the-norm camera at the time.

It is not just that smartphones got as good or better than these low-end cameras. The most important thing about a camera is whether you have it with you when you want to take a photo. And we all have our phones with us all the time.

Smartphones

All the action in photography is in smartphones these days. In fact, as phones have got more and more indistinguishable, camera quality has been one of the areas for competition. Originally there were just rear-facing cameras with single lenses and no optical zoom. Then front cameras for the ubiquitous "selfie". Then multiple lenses. Advanced AI image processing. It is still an area of active development. I'm sure the next generation of smartphones will have even better cameras, and will nibble away a little more at the low-end of the ultra-high-end market for cameras.

Image Sensors

The technology that enables digital photography is the image sensor. Today, these are usually called CMOS Image Sensors, or CIS, to distinguish them from the more expensive CCD image sensors (these are used in telescopes since almost half of all the photons will be detected—important when looking at a dim and distant star).

The early CIS were built the way you would guess if you knew nothing. The light passed through the lens and fell on the chip, and the image was read out and processed. This caused a lot of difficulties as the pixels got smaller, since the light has to find its way through the interconnect.

So the first change was to switch so that the light came through the back of the die, which obviously had to be thinned enough that it was transparent. This became the dominant way to build CIS, starting in about 2012.

The next development was to put the logic die that did the processing underneath. This didn't require any TSVs or complex technology — remember, the image sensors "top" is already facing down. It was thus easy to have a huge number of connections between the image sensor itself and the processing unit. These were the first 3D chips to ship in high volume.

Some manufacturers went further and added a third thinned DRAM die in between. The photo (image!) shows a cross-section through a Sony CIS. The image sensor and DRAM die are just 2.5um thick. When I started in this business, that was the size of a transistor gate.

Gordon Moore

Everyone knows about Gordon Moore's quote about transistor counts doubling every couple of years. Here's another one:

If the auto industry advanced as rapidly as the semiconductor industry, a Rolls Royce would get half a million miles per gallon, and it would be cheaper to throw it away than to park it.

Semiconductor technology has been the driver of the photography market for the last few decades. First, it enabled digital photography and drove film photography from the market. Then it enabled smartphones and drove standalone digital photography from the market. Smartphones are now the dominant way to take photographs and make videos. The technology continues to improve, along with resolution, frame-rate, and almost any measure of quality that you choose to look at.

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