It is sooner than you think, the iphones and your blackberrys will end up with a 12 MP camera rather than the ones they have now! The future is near where you can flip you camera phone and take a picture with a quality
that will be or better than a camcoder, thanks to the Quantum dot technology.
Being worked on by InVisage Technologies, based in Menlo Park, Calif., which spent more than three years to build a proprietary film that coats the image sensors used in cellphone cameras allowing them to capture more light. The firm would be the first to have a very rare commericial use of an exotic semiconductor material called quatum dot.
The image sensors in today’s cameras use silicon to capture light and its performance is not the best especially in low lights leading to blurred images. Instead of working with the silicon to make it better the company used a new approach and turned to quantum dots to build what it calls Quantum Film which is a layer of semiconductor material that gathers light much better than silicon giving upto 4 times a better image than today’s cell phone cameras.
Quantum dots are essentially semiconductor particles about a nanometer — or a billionth of a meter — in size. These Quantum dots are to be applied on exotic materials and then their properties are to be controlled. The company declined to reveal whata materials they use for their dots but they did show the liquid with has quatum dots suspended in it and which is spread on to the semiconductor material.
Analysts predict that this could be a huge leap in mobile photographic technology, with phones growing in memory size and functions, a better camera is all we would need for it to make it a perfect digi-cam. Unlike licensing the film to companies like Sony, Toshibha etc, InVisage plans to make their own film and sell it to cell phone companies directly and the production is expected to start in about 18 months from now.
The company said that with this technology, the current 3 Megapixel iphone camera would be turned to a 12 Megapixel camera which sure is a giant leap. Then the iphone would be a perfect digi-cam! The first camera phones quipped with the quantum dots technology should be out by early 2012.