[Hypocorism]

Sony is obviously confident that it's on a roll and seems quite willing to back that with their latest JPY100bn spend.

Sony Global - News Releases - Sony to double production capacity for image sensors

As well as ramped up production capacity, surely this leads to accelerated R&D into new tech. too. ?

And for Hoya~Pentax choosing to be on the train... the future looks so bright we might all have to wear shades!

.R.

[philbaum]

There was a thread on the other unnamed forum that Canon's share of Japanese DSLR sales had declined 6% from 38 percent roughly in 2009 to 32% last year, the largest decrease of any dslr maker, and far more than the 1.2% decrease of Nikon's share, from 28% to 26.8%.

Then in the news column, there was a report that Sony is investing 1.5 billion in cmos production (as repeated here)

Taking into account that 2 of the hottest(maybe not in terms of sales, but in interest) cameras this year are the D7000 and the K5 using the Sony exemor sensor, it looks like Sony sensors are ascending in popularity and Canon sensors are trending down. Looks like Sony's selling of sensors to anyone walking through the door is a better market strategy than Canon, or perhaps just that Sony sensor Division has a better technical team at the moment.

Always fun to speculate on world trends :-)

[wjjstu]

It looks like from that press release that they're just looking for more capacity to make sensors for the next wave of tablets and smartphones.

[falconeye]

The most significant single figures from the press release are the investment (1.2 bn $) and that it buys another 25k wafers/m.

That's enough for about another 400% of the world APSC market meaning that camera phones must be their target indeed.

And it means that if investment is about 50% of cost for three years (operation being the other half), cost per wafer is about 2700 $. Which is very close to my earlier cost estimates used in estimating cost of APSC, FF and MF sensors.

The current driving force seems to be camera phones which may be a problem for Canon who have no foot in that market AFAIK.

The current success of Sony is mostly due to the invention of the row ADCs embedded on chip. That may be a few engineers making the difference. But the distance may further grow in the future...

[shadesfischer]

I'm sure we'll eventually see an APSC camera phone. I'd be first in line for one of those....

[Rondec]

I'm sure we'll eventually see an APSC camera phone. I'd be first in line for one of those....

I would doubt it. Register distance and size of lenses would make it completely unusable as a phone...

[falconeye]

I would doubt it. Register distance and size of lenses would make it completely unusable as a phone...

That's true.

Except that I posted a way to work around it. I described "my" invention somewhere else in forum. Feasible but not anywhere soon.

[Aku Ankka]

I would doubt it. Register distance and size of lenses would make it completely unusable as a phone...

Small image-spacetelecentric lens basicly touching the sensor?