Toshiba Teli CMOS camera provides colour data down to the pixel

Toshiba Teli developed the colour camera CSF5M7C3L18NR specifically for application areas such as microscopy and image measurement that require single pixel colour rendering. The system comprises an easy-to-handle camera head and a compact control unit fitted with a fast FireWire b interface and is based on a Foveon X3 CMOS sensor with a 1420 x 1060 pixel matrix. The camera produces up to 6.5 full resolution images per second and as much as 30 images per second in VGA quality. As a speciality, the camera’s CMOS chip uses three superimposed sensor layers enabling it to record all three primary colours in full for every pixel. Conventional sensors fitted with mosaic colour filters only measure the colour intensity of one primary colour for each pixel. Missing colour information is interpolated using the intensities measured by the surrounding pixels. The X3 image sensor, in contrast, records the entire RGB colour information for every pixel with its three sensor layers. In this way, Toshiba Teli’s camera achieves an exceptionally exact and, most importantly, sharp colour rendering on the pixel level. Colour artefacts such as moiré effects at high-contrast edges or fine details caused by colour value interpolation are ruled out.