Sony Pregius S Global Shutter Sensors

[androidlad]

👉https://thinklucid.com/tech-briefs/sony-4th-generation-pregius-s/

This is a very well-written article with nicely made charts on the evolution of Sony Pregius S global shutter sensors. I highly recommend a read.

FYI, ZCAM E2G uses the 2nd gen 1" IMX267, and from user feedback, the image quality is poor.

Bear in mind that Pregius S sensors are intended for industrial use,👉 they are never optimised for pure photographic image quality. Across the four generations, their imaging performance (dynamic range, sensitivity etc.) remain largely unchanged, while increasing pixel count.

However it's worth noting that 4th gen introduced dual ADC (Dual Conversion Gain) on-chip HDR mode which could potentially provide a more usable image for creative work. As this mode halves the maximum framerate, only the high speed version of the sensors can output video framerate at 30P in HDR mode, it's considerably more expensive than the standard speed variant therefore it's a another hurdle for consumer use.

[Andrew Reid]

I would like to see the image in HDR 24p mode with that dual conversion gain enabled. Probably quite nice. Is low light still challenging with global shutter? The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K had a lot of ciruits on the front side taking up room. These are not BSI Sony chips are they?

[Emanuel]

2 hours ago, androidlad said:

FYI, ZCAM E2G uses the 2nd gen 1" IMX267, and from user feedback, the image quality is poor.

Thanks for the heads-up : ) Where have you heard or read it?

[androidlad]

9 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

I would like to see the image in HDR 24p mode with that dual conversion gain enabled. Probably quite nice. Is low light still challenging with global shutter? The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K had a lot of ciruits on the front side taking up room. These are not BSI Sony chips are they?

No, that sensor is from CMOSIS. Sony only introduced BSI to its global shutter sensors in the very recent 4th gen Pregius S.

Even with BSI, the memory node still takes up some space on the photosite, plus the reason Sony went BSI is to further shrink pixel pitch, so it cancels out each other.

With dual conversion gain, the readout noise doubles and it's already quite high at 2.1e-, so I don't think low light sensitivity will be any good.

The ultimate global shutter sensor design would be pixel-parallel ADC (one ADC per pixel), but it's still in very early stages of R&D.