Inside Story

"After the optimum amount of light reaches the CCD begins the work of the image processing team," tacks on Kazuhiro Yoshida, who was involved in tuning the circuit design and image processing engine. He noted, "We were involved in designing circuitry that would hand over the image data captured by the 10MP CCD to the image processing engine without subtracting from the beauty and clarity."

"Any increase in CCD pixels directly implies an increase in the amount of data to transfer. To transfer massive amounts of data in a short amount of time requires faster transfer speeds, but electric signals tend to deteriorate when the transfer speed is increased. Moreover, the CCD and image processing engine are physically separated in order to smoothly shift the CCD in anti-shake control, which inevitably extends the signal wire from the CCD to the image processing engine and makes it more susceptible to noise. We, therefore, spent a lot of time tuning and optimizing signals so that images from the CCD are handed over to the image processing engine without deteriorating," says Yoshida.

Looking back on the day-in day-out trials of development, Yoichi Tsunoda, who was in charge of circuitry design for the image processing engine, recounted that "the task was to draw out the performance of the 'Smooth Imaging Engine III'". With an increase in the number of CCD pixels, the amount of light captured by each pixel becomes relatively small. Nevertheless, the R8 targeted a picture quality that would deliver natural-looking, high resolution, low noise images from corner to corner.