Dalsa Application Note

[marknorton]

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Here's an interesting application note from Dalsa which describes using their sensors in digital camera applications. Dalsa may or may not be the supplier for the M8 (Kodak seems more likely) but they were the supplier for the ill-fated Mamiya large format digital camera and of course, they do an 11MP full frame sensor.

 

The information presented is necessarily technical and will appeal to those of you who know something about electronics.

 

http://www.dalsa.com/pi/documents/Application_Note_Subsystem_FTF5066M-FTF5066C-FTF4052C-FTF4052M-FTF4027C-FTF4027M-FTF3020C-FTF3020M-FTF2416C-FTF2416M-FTF2020M_AN09R1.pdf

 

BTW, the sensor which would find its way into an FF camera is the FTF4027C.

 

One especially interesting aspect (for your correspondent at least) is the range of different operating voltages which the sensor uses and the sequencing requirements when the camera is powered up and down. My dissected D2 on the old web-site showed a series of small power supplies on the circuit board and this, together with information on the Kodak web-site, suggests power management for the CCD sensor is a significant complexity generally.

 

In the block diagram on Page 6, uC refers to the microcontroller which will be responsible for the camera's "look and feel" and DSP is the digital signal processor which will take the sensor output and process it for storage and display, including (in the case of Leica's implementation) the lens unique processing.

 

As I say, this is not Leica's camera but the issues will be similar and gives an insight into what's involved at a technical level in a digital camera.