New light sensor technology

Using solar cell technology, Japanese researchers in Rohm and government institutes have prototyped light sensors that are 100x more sensitive than existing tech like CCD or CMOS. Instead they are using CIGS. This totally makes sense, since efforts in solar cells is to maximize the energy collected from the light sources (namely, the Sun).

In theory, if the performance is that much better, you can take multiple signal points and average them out to reduce noise, and it’ll still be way faster than a regular CCD I think.

So, how does this affect me? Digital camera will take sharper pictures under lower light conditions, since the exposure time of each shot will be much shorter. This is help you take better pictures, but also help machine vision for suboptimal light conditions.

And from a Science perspective, microscopes will be able to take images more quickly. This is important for imaging enhancing technique that require high volume of images, deconvolution, and signal averaging, and other tricks to get by optical limitations. link