Recently, I was taken aback by several press releases claiming that Sony has apparently indicated its plan to discontinue the production of all CCD sensors by 2017. However, a lot of controversy is surrounding this announcement, followed by several companies pulling their press releases pending official word from Sony. Nevertheless, whether now or later, this move by Sony is not necessarily entirely unexpected.
I still remember the unavoidable argument of CCD vs. CMOS—which one is better? In recent months, CMOS technology in the image sensor market has pretty much surpassed CCD sensor in dynamic range, speed, resolutions and other areas. An ‘EOL’ or end of life announcement of any major technology is certainly a disruptive event. Entire camera product lines will be affected and drop-in replacements may not be very straight forward using CMOS detectors due to differences in pixel pitch and sensor sizes amongst a slew of other things. Some government contracts may have stipulations that suppliers have to guarantee the availability of replacement products for another seven to 10 years. In any case, this development is just one more indicator in the machine vision industry that things are changing. It is yet one more differentiator soon to be removed from the product offerings of machine vision (and other) cameras.