# Graphene camera sensors



## hamlet (Sep 14, 2013)

This is a very interesting article that talks about the atom world and how it will change photography. 

*"1,000 times more sensitive to light: How graphene camera sensors could revolutionize photography"*

Singaporean researchers are engineering some seriously futuristic optics at the nanoscale level








You probably aren't  too familiar with graphene, but you soon will be. Basically, it's a  two-dimensional arrangement of carbon atoms fit together like a  honeycomb. Each sheet is just one-atom thick, giving it a structural  integrity that makes for the the world's strongest material. It also has some pretty magical properties that are perfect for tomorrow's electronics.

 Not only is graphene extremely flexible, durable, and conductive to  electricity, but it also possesses the unique ability to "absorb light  over a very broad wavelength range," notes ExtremeTech.  With some minor nanostructural changes and the addition of a  transistor, graphene can help us see things today's best optics can't   even in near-total darkness.

 Researchers in Singapore have now tapped graphene's superior imaging  capabilities to build a camera sensor that's 1,000 times more sensitive  to light than those found in today's CMOS or CCD camera sensors. Better  yet, the graphene sensor consumes about 10 times less energy, and will  reportedly be five times cheaper to produce.
 "We have shown that it is now possible to create cheap, sensitive,  and flexible photo sensors from graphene alone," Wang Qijie, an  assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University who is credited  with inventing the graphene sensor, tells Science Daily. "We expect our innovation will have great impact not only on the  consumer imaging industry, but also in satellite imaging and  communication industries, as well as the mid-infrared applications."

 Consider the possibilities: Space telescopes outfitted with graphene  sensors could help us peer even further into the universe's oldest  corners, discovering galaxies and worlds we would have never seen  otherwise. Here on Earth, security cameras could take crystal-clear  photos even with all the lights out.

 That said, today's manufacturing limitations _probably _means  that graphene won't be coming to your iPhone anytime soon. (Meticulously  fitting carbon atoms into a lattice structure is tough work, after  all.) But in the not-so-distant future? Those annoying camera flashes  making for blurry, washed-out photos could very well be obsolete.


Article: link

This won't stop just at lenses:


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## Gavjenks (Sep 14, 2013)

Well this does indeed sound revolutionary, potentially. In terms of cost and noise and such.

But the claims that it can "take crystal clear photos with all the lights off" are way off base.  It doesn't matter if your sensor is 28,000,000,000,000 times more sensitive to light, because light is not a continuous substance. It comes in discreet packets, and when you turn off all the lights, you run into serious limitations in the amount of data that is possible to collect due to a scarcity of packets. If you want to capture, let's say, 12 stops of dynamic range, then you need to have an average of about 170 photons bouncing off of every pixel's worth of space in your scene during the exposure (assuming an equal division of dynamic range stops), as an absolute theoretical minimum.

If you have less than that, you can certainly still generate images, but they will not have DSLR quality dynamic range or noiselessness, and will start to look really poor, no matter how good your sensor is. And it's very easy to have less than that in standard "oh hey look it's really dark" conditions.

Passive nightvision amplification of only a few photons here or there looks something like this:

(Wiki Commons)

And that's still with starlight and such. Note that a human would have been able to see much of the same information in that image with their naked eye, too.

If it is in fact, truly blackout dark to your own dark-adapted eyes, then no sensor can possibly make a crystal clear image, because human eyes are already capable of registering single photons.

You could do slightly better with UV and IR sensitivity, which it is implied this sensor has more of, but usually these wavelengths are intentionally blocked anyway for photography, because they make things look different than how we are used to seeing them.


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## hamlet (Sep 14, 2013)

I am actually much more interested if companies will want to adopt this near unbreakable material. If the claims are true, then we could see unbreakable, unscratchable, cameras and lenses. The super efficient batteries in a camera could hold charges for many human lifetimes. Its kind of insane to think about all the applications this material could be used in.


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## Ilovemycam (Sep 14, 2013)

Good. I luv shooting in the dark!


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## Gavjenks (Sep 14, 2013)

I'm not sure where you're getting "unbreakable" or "unscratchable," or how this would apply to lenses, or how this applies to a useful battery (capacitor I could see, but how a controlled release battery?). I noticed none of thise mentioned in the article or video.

Stronger than steel, harder than diamond doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of practical ruggedness when something is only two atoms thick...  Give me a sheet of two atoms thick steel and I could break it by breathing on it, probably. So this would effectively be as strong as the medium it is "printed" on.  As for scratching, for something 2 atoms thick, you don't have to really scratch it in a traditional, Moh's hardness scale way. Any object hitting it with any force would just snap the sheet at a micro level and thus interfere with electrical flow and transistor performance, etc.  So even though it hasn't raked off material like a normal "Scratch," your sensor is still broken.  Even if it's "very flexible," that again doesn't mean much when you have something the size of a grain of sand (impossibly massive by comparison) grinding down with half a pound of force, stretching the sheet of graphene trillions of times the length of it's thickness. Nothing is THAT flexible.


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## Ilovemycam (Sep 14, 2013)

Gavjenks said:


> Well this does indeed sound revolutionary, potentially. In terms of cost and noise and such.
> 
> But the claims that it can "take crystal clear photos with all the lights off" are way off base. It doesn't matter if your sensor is 28,000,000,000,000 times more sensitive to light, because light is not a continuous substance. It comes in discreet packets, and when you turn off all the lights, you run into serious limitations in the amount of data that is possible to collect due to a scarcity of packets. If you want to capture, let's say, 12 stops of dynamic range, then you need to have an average of about 170 photons bouncing off of every pixel's worth of space in your scene during the exposure (assuming an equal division of dynamic range stops), as an absolute theoretical minimum.
> 
> ...



I tried to buy nightvison cameras. I could never get anywhere with it. Where can I buy on?


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## Gavjenks (Sep 14, 2013)

I have no idea. Like it says, that image is from wiki commons, not a personal starlight nightvision setup.


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## hamlet (Sep 14, 2013)

Gavjenks said:


> I'm not sure where you're getting "unbreakable" or "unscratchable," or how this would apply to lenses, or how this applies to a useful battery (capacitor I could see, but how a controlled release battery?). I noticed none of thise mentioned in the article or video.
> 
> Stronger than steel, harder than diamond doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of practical ruggedness when something is only two atoms thick...  Give me a sheet of two atoms thick steel and I could break it by breathing on it, probably. So this would effectively be as strong as the medium it is "printed" on.  As for scratching, for something 2 atoms thick, you don't have to really scratch it in a traditional, Moh's hardness scale way. Any object hitting it with any force would just snap the sheet at a micro level and thus interfere with electrical flow and transistor performance, etc.  So even though it hasn't raked off material like a normal "Scratch," your sensor is still broken.  Even if it's "very flexible," that again doesn't mean much when you have something the size of a grain of sand (impossibly massive by comparison) grinding down with half a pound of force, stretching the sheet of graphene trillions of times the length of it's thickness. Nothing is THAT flexible.



It was an article i read at the doctors waiting room. I forget what the magazine was called.


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## burekwilles (Oct 16, 2013)

hamlet said:


> This is a very interesting article that talks about the atom world and how it will change photography.
> 
> *"1,000 times more sensitive to light: How graphene camera sensors could revolutionize photography"*
> 
> ...



Hey,, really awesome article to read,, 
I'm really glad to read the entire post, It would be great if you could post the source from where you got this stuff!!
I'll be very thankful to you,,


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## petrochemist (Mar 11, 2014)

Ilovemycam said:


> I tried to buy nightvison cameras. I could never get anywhere with it. Where can I buy on?



Theres no reason you can't just photograph the image at the eyepiece of a standard nightscope. Compact cameras or even phone cams are quite up to the task.
However it's also quite possible that the wiki image is a standard night shot processed to look like a nightvision shot...


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