Originally posted by pinholecam Highly unlikely unless one has a boat load of money to sponsor some Fab somewhere.
A typical wafer is 12" and last I checked it was $50K, each.
Thats excluding additional processes and yields along the way to make it into a sensor chip.
Yield is going to be poor, since most likely, only 1-2 chips can be gained from one wafer, since a whole 6x7 surface area will need to be good as opposed to smaller formats where some ares can be marked out.
And then we need to add in the cost of making a low volume camera.
A 12 inch wafer (actually 300mm) has the area of 16,8 real 67D sensors, but due to edge cutoff i guess its possible to get about 12 sensors of that size from each wafer. Wafer prices (300mm) is actually down to $40K now. You say yields have to be low because the whole area has to be good. I disagree. Todays sensors are not perfect, even if they are sold as so. There are a usually a few dead or stuck pixels on every sensor, but theese are mapped out in the non upgradable part of the firmware. I think its acceptable to increase tolerance for dead/stuck pixels along increasing sensor area, mabe even higher per area dead/stuck pixels. That will help yield a lot. If we get 8 accepted sensors from every wafer thats $5K each. Now its starting to get within resonable range. Low volume is probably a larger cost. Lithography masks and processing is not cheap. Usually lithography and processing is a fraction of wafer costs in mass production, but in low volume it might get twice as expensive. So maby $15K or so for the sensor alone. The camera it self doesent cost much in terms of materials, but lots of expensive engineering, product design, marketing and distribution must be financed by quite few buyers. Based on wild guesses i think Pentax could sell one 67D camera for every one hundred 645Z at a list price of $100K. How many 645Z-s is expected to be sold in 2015? If Leica can sell their 45x30mm format S camera at $25K, Pentax could easily take $100K for a 70x60mm format camera.
Originally posted by southlander Also, any thought as to how big the resulting image files would be, assuming current pixel densities were used? The files would be completely unwieldy for the average person's computing set-ups. Maybe if you had the CIA's or NASA's budget....
I don't think memory cards, HDD space or ram is any economc consern to those buying a $100K camera.
It doesen't make sense to push pixel densities to 4 micron as on APS-C and FF. A large sensor like this needs a high yield lithography node at lets say 90 nm, and no fancy BSI or stacking technikes. As someone else noted lens resolution is also a problem. A sensor like this should be optimized for extremly low dark curren/termal noise and read noise. So no fast readouts at 12 bit. I belive 6-10 micron could be a resonable size. That will result in 42 - 116 MPix. But you will get resonable low noise pictures at ISO 1 million!
Note: If phone camera pixel densities was transfered to a FF sensor it would have over 800 MPix, and suck already at ISO 1600. Transfer it to a 67D and you get a multi GPix camera that sucks at 100% crop because of lenses, and still suck at ISO 800 noise.
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Originally posted by GeneV It seems like first we would see a "full frame" 645 sensor. Adding yet another digital platform does not make too much sense.
Totally agree, but that has to be a CMOS, and those are very expensive in low volume. A CCD at that size is not to attractive (Think 645Z CMOS vs 645D CCD), and a CMOS would require teaming up with Hasselblad, Phase One and so on to realize it. And it doesent make a world of difference. A 67D would even if accepting worse production process and tens of dead/stuck pixels. Back in the film days it was a broader range of sizes, with big differences. Now sensor sizes are packed around the 35mm small format and dont show that large differences any more.
Even 120-film is not so much up to the competition in terms of noise from vastly smaller digital sensors. Making a digital 67 would really ramp up lots of qualities.
Originally posted by ndevlin This is a fun 'over beers' discussions, which I do not mean to dampen, but the reality is this won't happen, really ever.
Absolutly, and it's fun!