> Next generation CMOS sensors puts great photography in to your pocket
You no more need large sensors and heavy equipment to do good general photos. The recent development of image sensors put silicon chip capabilities to it's limit by
designing BSI CMOS sensors. Sony is the leading manufacturer with it's EXMOR R line. Sony sensors are wide used in specialised astronomy cameras as QHY, ZWO and ToupTek. Pentax and Nikon also use Sony sensors.
Now we can have sensors with smaller pixel size providing good QE, dynamic range and noise levels. Recent development of phone photography kills the DSLR sales as most of the users are not professional photographers and they do not need to buy heavy and expensive equipment for their needs. To address that mirror-less cameras comes to stand between DSLR and mobile, providing light equipment with large sensors and professional capabilities.
However for applications like astrophotography, we still would prefer a DSLR, as the live view is not capable to provide us good enough preview into the dark.
We need it to focus and recognise the objects into the filed. Pentax is the only brand that will keep its focus on DSLR and will release APS-C flagship DSLR K3 III with the great Sony 26MPix BSI sensor Sony IMX571
We can do some great stuff with just a small planetary camera as QHY5III178 or mobile phone as Motorola One Vision.
Instead of having larger optics we can have sensors with finer pixels and better design. Still could limits us things like atmospheric turbulence, optics quality and allowed pixel sampling by your tracking. Check out this pixel sampling calculator : https://astronomy.tools/calculators/ccd_suitability
I have tested Motorola one vision which is equipped with Samsung ISOCELL GM1 sensor. It uses pixel binning technology to switch from 48MPix to12Mpix by combining pixel signal and improving sensitivity, noise and DR.
This sensors are now widely used across many phone models. Also it has improved design to reach great quantum efficiency with almost no lost of detected photons :
Here is ISOCELL GM1 sensor information: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/isocell/newsroom/blog/iso...
I did some test shots and I am impressed by the low light performance of ISOCELL. Despite there is still some noise, it is incredible result for that small sensor. It bets most of the DSLRs produced before 2010 and for sure all with the old CCD sensors.
In conjunction with the unlimited capabilities of the software that you can have on your phone, this is a powerful photography tool. It has all the needed manual control settings like ISO and shutter speed.
The only thing that keeps you away from the serious photography is that you have only the build in optics :)
Milky way with Motto One Vision (one shot 30s) RAW. Then processed:
Paris from above with Motto One Vision and on phone processing. Impressive Dynamic Range :
Since beginning of 2023 Chat GPT was launched as a human language model and start a new era of technological development.
As may times I said it is essential to keep all your shots over the years, as you can go back and reprocess them.
Make new discoveries or improve the resulting image quality.
When we have a new newton telescope we shroud avoid touch the collimation of the secondary mirror as we may get into troubles.
You no more need large sensors and heavy equipment to do good general photos. The recent development of image sensors put silicon chip capabilities to it's limit by