Within 10 years or so, we'll have HUGE cheap sensors (say $2000) <snip>
Edmund
I wish it were true, but I doubt it. In digital electronics, expensive becomes cheap only when two factors converge: Moore's Law AND a mass marketplace. If demand develops for massive sensors in some other, large volume selling sector, then there is a chance that we MFD photographers will benefit from piggybacking on that development. What that sector would be, who knows? Medicine, military, TV & cinema production, scientific imaging...probably none of these is really large enough to be sufficiently "mass market" on its own, even if they would want huge sensors. And the other problem is that Moore's Law doesn't really work the way we would want it: it's primarily not about making physically larger devices, but rather about making devices which are smaller, cheaper, more potent per unit area or volume (or a mix of these properties). The trend for giant LCD/LED TVs is one of the few examples which runs counter to this.
An area which I am involved in, astronomical CCD imaging, is a good comparison and analogy for MFD. High-end, well-off amateurs started using very tiny cooled CCDs around 1990. They had maybe 128x128 pixels (don't laugh!), were 2x2 mm or so in area, and were ferociously expensive. In the 20 years since, astro sensors have got bigger and better thanks to Moore, but the real step-changes in price-performance occured whenever the astro-cam manufacturers got a new sensor from Kodak or Sony
which was already being produced in huge volumes for consumer cameras. So now, for example, you have the thermoelectrically cooled, 25mm x 18mm, full-spectrum sensitive Orion StarShoot Pro Deep Space Color CCD Camera for only $1200:
http://www.telescope.com/control/astrophot...olor-ccd-cameraWhy such great value for a niche product? Because it is built around a mass-produced Sony DSLR chip, that's why. And so it is with MFD: like astro-imaging, we need another sector/market/industry trend to be the white knight riding to our rescue, creating that mass demand for huge sensors, lowering the unit price of the core component of our special niche imaging devices. If we want to engage in crystal ball gazing, that's what our focus should be on.
