Sensor Characteristics

Sensor characteristics determine if a sensor is suitable for your application or not. Your application often has requirements on the amount of noise that is allowed or a specific dynamic range is required. This again sets requirements on the full well of the sensor. Then there are other characteristics such as parasitic light sensitivity, dark current, quantum efficiency and more.

Until now the mentioned specifications are inherent to the sensor. A camera manufacturer cannot influence them a lot. Other sensor characteristics can be improved by a camera manufacturer. For example think of uniformity corrections and defect pixel corrections.

Most of these sensor characteristics are covered by the EMVA1288 standard.

On this page we will give some links to other articles where we will discuss the above characteristics in more details.

Parasitic light sensitivity

A blog about What is PLS?

Dark noise

A blog about how to measure the dark noise correctly:

• https://www.adimec.com/how-to-measure-the-dark-noise-profile-in-a-camera/
• https://www.adimec.com/low-read-noise-for-low-noise-applications-and-low-light-cameras-but-also-other-considerations/

Dark current

We will soon write about this…

Full well

We wrote about the relation between shot noise and the full well in a two blogs:

• https://www.adimec.com/relation-full-well-and-shot-noise/
• https://www.adimec.com/relation-between-full-well-and-shot-noise-part-2/

Dynamic range

Dynamic range is a measure for the smallest and largest video signal that can be measured in a single exposure. We covered it as well in the past.

• https://www.adimec.com/high-full-well-capacity-versus-high-dynamic-range/
• https://www.adimec.com/camera-dynamic-range-requirements-for-machine-vision-versus-visual-applications/
• https://www.adimec.com/how-to-interpret-the-dynamic-range-and-signal-to-noise-ratio-snr-in-image-sensor-and-industrial-camera-specifications/
• https://www.adimec.com/dynamic-range-dnr-and-signal-to-noise-ratio-snr-for-ccd-and-cmos-image-sensors/

Quantum efficiency

How much light is converted to electrons. That’s what quantum efficiency tells you. We wrote about it on these pages:

• We will soon write about this…

Uniformity and flat field correction

Uniformity is a characteristic that can be improved with corrections by the camera manufacturer. We wrote about this topic in more details on the following pages:

• https://www.adimec.com/how-to-remove-light-source-and-illumination-optics-artifacts-from-your-camera-image/
• https://www.adimec.com/which-types-of-flat-field-corrections-exist-and-why-it-matters-for-high-resolution-cameras/
• https://www.adimec.com/how-to-use-flat-field-correction-in-practice/

EMVA1288

EMVA1288 is a standard that covers most of the sensor characteristics and it standardizes the way these characteristics are measured. We have written several times about how this standard can help you:

• https://www.adimec.com/what-will-emva1288-data-tell-you-and-what-it-wont/
• https://www.adimec.com/one-camera-multiple-different-emva1288-reports/
• https://www.adimec.com/a-cheat-sheet-for-explaining-the-emva1288-parameters/