Interesting interview with Canon 1Ds developers

Forgive me if this has been posted before, but I found it a good read

http://www.canon.com/technology/intervi ... os_p1.html

I'll never call this camera overpriced again......

A

The most interesting thing to me is that even the engineers who built it are cautious not to make claims about quality rivaling 35mm. Here in the US we have so-called experts boisterously claiming it rivals 6x7... must be a culture thing

Guy

Probably off topic here im sure, but i just seen a 36 by 48 print from a 1ds that looked pretty amazing. Especially from about 10ft back

robert...............

The article, while heavily over simplified gives a good insight into semiconductor processing and the economies of scale. The imager is made with a .35 micron technology which, if Canon's yields at that technology node were the very best in the world, and assuming zero defective pixels as the quality standard (which they are not) would yield about 5 usable sensors off of every wafer. The average fully depreciated wafer cost at this technology point will be in the $600 to $800 range. Realistically, with depreciation, the cost is probably closer to $1200 so that means the sensor alone costs them about $240 per camera. The surface area of the sensor is huge relative to similar CMOS semiconductor devices and is there fro susceptible to defects. The example in the article of 20 killer defects on a standard product wafer resulting in 1980 out of 2000 functional, would leave very few if any good sensors on this type of wafer.