Sound familiar?

[adan]

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"The same scene was destined to be repeated many times as the camera design was refined and the manufacture undertaken. For the ITEK engineers it was a choice between the frying pan and the fire.

 

If they failed to produce a recently acquired picture, scientists and supervisors imagined the worst.....the end-to-end camera system didn't work.

 

If they DID distribute a picture, then every defect was noted, generally with caustic remarks about the cost of the camera and the quality of the image."

 

 

The preceeding was quoted from the official history of the Viking Mars Mission - and specifically the ITEK scanning digital cameras evetually landed on the surface of Mars in 1976 - at NASA.gov, a source in the public domain.

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[adan]

whoops - it gets even better!

 

"As previously mentioned, there are three sensors with blue, green, and red filters in the focal plane of the camera. These record the radiance of the scene in blue, green, and red light. However, the multilayer interference filters used in the cameras (simpler absorptive emulsion layers would have been degraded by preflight heat sterilization) have very irregular spectral response. The blue channel, for example, responds slightly but significantly to -----infrared light-----."

[luigi bertolotti]

A very funny quotation found in the archives... compliments... for the record, I have a very old number of Scientific American (Italian version... do not remember the exact year... have to find it, but seem about '74) with an inetersting article titled "the Charge Coupled Device"...

... after all, the sensor is no more than an exposure meter...