Glenn Chan |
December 25th, 2003 12:34 AM |
The CCD sizes are all weird. The actual sizes of the CCD is a lot lower than the numbers. There was a thread on this a while back, which points to a nice article on dpreview.com about CCD sizes. But 1/3" is still bigger than 1/4" and so on and so forth.
Bigger chips are generally better. IF both chips have the same number of pixels, then the bigger chip will have bigger pixels. Bigger pixels means that there's less electrical noise and that more light will be picked up. This increases sensitivity/low light. The ultimate effect is better picture quality and better low light. There are a whole bunch of other factors that affect picture quality and low light, so you are better off considering those end results rather than looking at specs.
Some CCDs are designed to have extra pixels to give better stills. This tends to worsen low light performance. In a 3CCD cam more than ~380k is not that great (some of the panasonic consumer cams do that). For 1CCD cams, a 680k pixel CCD can give better low light than a larger 1080k pixel CCD (TRV22 vs TRV33).
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