Remember when watching TV meant leaving time to let tubes warm up, banging the side of the set to make sure everything was working right, and then adding some aluminum foil to the antenna to try to make the picture a little better? When I was growing up in Buffalo, NY, if you used just the right amount of aluminum foil, shaped just the right way, on a day with just the right weather, you might be able to get Channel 12 in Erie, PA - so you could watch the Bills play at home on a Sunday (because back then, all home games were blacked out).

We've come a long way - aluminum foil has been replaced by cable, satellite dishes, and DVDs (and Blu-Ray); the tubes are all integrated circuits; and screens have grown from standard definition to 1080p, 16:9 widescreen displays. All in the search for better pictures - more natural, more lifelike, more realistic.

The move to HD resolutions has been a big part of that change - at 1080p resolution, televisions now have about 6 times the screen resolution of a standard resolution sets That's one of the reasons TV pictures look so much better today, especially on large screen sets - with so many more pixels on the screen, details in the image are sharper and more realistic. Just image how fast Golden Wheels Dubenion would have looked in HD.

But just having more pixels isn't enough - it's also important to know how each of those pixels perform. For a display, that's things like contrast ratio and refresh rate. But for the image sensor used to capture the image, it's understanding things like dynamic range, frame rate, image smear, and color fidelity. The specific requirements will vary by application - what's needed in a professional camera is more than what's needed in a consumer camcorder. But understanding these requirements up front is really important - otherwise, you end up with a sensor that has the right number of pixels, but the wrong overall performance.

The easiest way to deal with this is to develop the best technology you can - to meet the needs of the most demanding markets, and exceed expectations in others.

Last year, Kodak introduced a new technology platform for Interline Transfer CCDs that incorporates Kodak's best practices in image sensor design. This new platform reduces pixel size by almost 50%, doubles frame rate, and significantly improves image quality compared to the previous generation of technology. At that time, we also announced the first product to use this new technology - a 1k x 1k sensor targeted to industrial markets. Now, we're announcing the second - aimed right at HD applications.

The new device - the KODAK KAI-02150 Image Sensor - fully meets the 1080p standard for image capture: 1920 x 1080 pixels, progressive scan (that's the "p" in 1080p), and 60 frame per second readout (which is actually twice the frame rate of standard 1080p signals). Plus, it has the dynamic range, imaging performance, and color fidelity needed for high quality video - whether for broadcast or applied markets like medical imaging or traffic monitoring. And all at a size (2/3" optical format) that matches with lenses commonly used in these applications.

Developing the right technology base at the start makes it easy to leverage it across a number of markets. We've now announced two products based on this new technology platform, and might even have some more news about it before too long. But for now, we're pretty excited about being able to bring this new technology to HD markets.

And keeping the aluminum foil in the kitchen where it belongs

Comments