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CCD or CMOS for Indie Film Making (5 posts)

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Anto said 3 months ago:

Hi everyone, i have a question for you, i wanted to know which sensors do you prefer CCD or CMOS, and i am planning to buy a camera with CCD Sensor, its a bridge camera from Fuji, S4000, 14 Megapixels ,it films in 720p, the video quality is good, but the thing that bothers me is a Vertical” Smear “, that is a problem that appears on CCD Sensors, when a camera is exposed to strong light a vertical line appears under and above that light…

If you go tu 7:24 on the video below you will see the vertical smear from the sun:

What bothers me is, could it be avoided, if not, is it a big problem and what do you think about it, thanks for your time

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John P. Hess said 3 months ago:

You pretty much found the only CCD Sensor camera left on the market :) I’m exaggerating of course but CMOS is taking over.

The way you avoid that is to not shoot avoid lens flares in your shot. You can do with with a matte box and flags (to shadow the lens) and with polarizing filters to block out those rays of light.

Personally, I prefer CMOS sensors but that’s just because all the latest cameras use it.
All my Best,
John Hess
Creative Industries Media Group | GospelJohn.net

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Anto said 3 months ago:

Thanks for the answer John, you are right, CMOS sensors are taking over, i guess that after all, i might buy CMOS sensor camera instead of CCD, i like CCDs becouse they have less noise, but now i see that newer CMOS sensors are definitely better, the CCDs are being used for cheaper cameras, and almost all DSLRs use CMOS…

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John P. Hess said 3 months ago:

@antony2207 said:
Thanks for the answer John, you are right, CMOS sensors are taking over, i guess that after all, i might buy CMOS sensor camera instead of CCD, i like CCDs becouse they have less noise, but now i see that newer CMOS sensors are definitely better, the CCDs are being used for cheaper cameras, and almost all DSLRs use CMOS…

Personally I think CMOS have a lot less noise than CCDs but that’s probably because they’re more modern.

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numballover said 3 months ago:

Back when I was actively studying engineering I had a better grasp of this, and sadly I forgot most of that stuff.

From what I remember CCD has a ton of advantages over CMOS mainly in the way it scans information and lower noise.

The prohibitive thing is the cost of scaling up CCD. The way CCD is made is a proprietary method using silicon wafers that not every manufacturing plant is equipped to handle. This means that if you increase the size beyond 1/3″ even slightly you cut the amount of chips made per wafer dramatically.

If you were to try and make a S35 sized CCD you’d be making about 25 chips per wafer vs. about 200 (just really rough guesses I didn’t do the math)

A CMOS chip can be made in pretty much any factory that produces other integrated circuits.

Another prohibitive problem is power usage. A CCD consumes about 100 times the power of a CMOS chip. Scaled up to the current size of CMOS chips and you’d be talking about some serious battery requirements for cameras, and by extension probably some over heating problems.

I’m sure there is more but that’s what I recall from the many years ago when I was in engineering school.
Movie Reviews from Killerfilm.com

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