Ruminating on Replaceable Sensors

[pvdhaar]

If you look at this from a slightlty different perspective.. replacable sensors already exist for a long time, and are offered by Pentax, Nikon, Canon, Sony and a couple of others. They're called DSLRs.

You get to keep your lenses and every couple of years you can upgrade the body. As the sensor and accompanying electronics constitute the major cost component of the body (and as Varjag explained are very much are tied into each other to form a complete system), it makes perfect sense to produce and sell them as a single item.

It's not only cost effective, it's robust as well; if you've ever had a modular medium format system like Hasselblad/Bronica/Rollei e.a. you'll recognise that the modular approach is nice if you're going to swap between finders, film backs and pola backs every couple of minutes, but that it's also prone to jamming, bent darkslides, interlocks, wrong settings and what not. They are compromise systems, trading dependability for versatility. A DSLR is a lot more reliable.

So, you've already got what you asked for.. just in a different form. Not only do you get the sensor, but a couple of buttons to press, and a means to see what the sensor will capture as well.

 

[wgerrard]

Again, I don't expect to see replaceable sensors happen because manufacturers believe they have no economic incentive to create them. It was economic incentive, and a fair amount of white-room reverse engineering, that created a PC platform based on interchangeability. It also helped that the dominant PC vendor shot itself in the foot. (IBM's move was roughly equivalent to Canon or Nikon bringing out cameras that only accept new lenses of a closed design that only they sell, and that generate image files that can be manipulated only with their software, not Photoshop.)

Open architecture: Has everything to do with this because it can't happen otherwise. You can't have an independent vendor selling shrink-wrapped sensors that fit any DSLR unless the designs of all those DSLR's, especially software, adhere to a common set of standards and protocols.

Pentiums in 1987 hardware: No, it won't work. Interchangeability does not stop obsolesence. Most digital products are technologically obsolete in a few years. There's no reason to expect digital cameras to be any different. Such a camera is simply a computer with a lens attached to it. The PC market tells us that independent vendors of interchangeable parts can thrive if the architecture supports it. Today, I can shop for any number of CPU's to plug into the motherboard of that PC I built a few years ago. I can also plug in a new motherboard and really expand my options. Twenty years from now, though, that PC will be trash. So will every DSLR sold this year, and next year, and ...

Fine tolerances: Arguably, tolerances in hard drives, for example, are just as fine. They're sold as well-packaged and well-protected shrink-wrapped products that are screwed into a compartment and attached with cables. Tolerances in lenses are fine, and they've been replaceable for decades.

Processing power: I'm missing something here because I don't understand why replaceable sensors would require more processing power.

'Tis money, not tech, that stands in the way.