The Night Vision Camcorder And The Nobel Prize
Article by Mike Connery
How do cameras, telescopes and the Nobel Prize all fit together? We discovered that this year when the co-inventors of the CCD won the Nobel Prize.
Over the past several years, those who were awarded the Nobel Prize have generally been more known for research they have been doing in their fields. But the Nobel Prize originally was set up to reward those who created inventions more so than research. And the award this year to the two physicists who created the CCD returns the prize to inventors once again.
CCD stands for charge-coupled device. This is the internal device that digital cameras and camcorders use to gather the light from a scene and record it internally in the camera. Willard S Boyle and George E. Smith collaborated at Bell Labs in 1969 where they developed the technology and worked to create an actual working model. After their first attempts, they had an operational working prototype approximately one year later. This discovery changed the world of image recording forever.
Since the time of their original work, it has totally revolutionalized all the areas which depend on image capture.
In addition to quick adoption in cameras and camcorders, CCD technology was also quickly adapted to such items as telescopes and medical imaging devices. The CCD quickly went to space and is used in space probes, spy satellites and astronomical telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Ground based telescopes also quickly changed over to CCDs. The old procedures of using film in telescopes is a thing of the past. Now images are captured electronically and viewed and processed on computers.
The tremendous change in photography and video capture has been the change we are all most familiar with. Modern digital cameras and camcorders have quickly switched over to using technology that is a direct descendant of the CCD. Digital photography has quickly replaced film with it's ease of use and matching or better quality.
In addition, other uses such as night vision technology for night vision camcorders and night vision goggles all use the Nobel prize winner's technology to collect and amplify the light. These types of applications were not even available a few decades ago.
The work of Boyle and Smith in inventing the CCD has totally changed the world landscape of recording images. Their contribution to technology will be long remembered and applauded. If the granting of the Nobel Prize were to be graded by the actual number of human beings affected by the discovery, the invention of the CCD would assuredly rank near or at the top of the list.
Mike spends a lot of his free time blogging about night vision camcorder info and other night vision technology. Feel free to stop by and check out his latest information on using a low light night vision video camera.
