A 4K × 2 K-Pixel Color Image Pickup System

We have developed an experimental 4K × 2K pixel progressive scan color camera system. This new camera system has a data rate of 297MHz pixel/sec and 60 frame/sec and we are sure that horizontal and vertical limiting resolution of 1500TVL (TV lines) can be achieved on a color monitor. Instead of the previous approach of improving resolution simply by increasing the pixel count in a imager, a novel four-sensor pickup method with 2/3 inch 2 million pixel CMD (Charge Modulation Device) imagers is used in this system. These sensors have 1920 (H) × 1035 (V) pixels within a 16:9 wide aspect image area and are successfully driven at 148M pixel/sec in the progressive scan mode. In the four-sensor pickup method, two sensors are used for green and the rest are for red and blue. A spatial offset imaging method in the diagonal direction was applied to the two green sensors to improve the horizontal and vertical resolution effectively. The horizontal and vertical resolution of the red and blue signals become half that of the green signal, because only one 2M-pixel imager is used for each signal. The resolution of this system, however, is not degraded so much because the luminance signal is mainly composed of green signals. key words: very-high-resolution imaging, four-imager pickup method, CMD, HDTV