Realising the Significance of Light Sensitivity

2 Jul 2015

Illumination - one of the Sun's many strengths!

What's the Importance of Shorter Exposure times in Low-light Environments for Objects in Motion?

The fundamental nature of camera technology dictates low-lighting conditions pose a similar challenge to the movie, photographic and CCTV industries alike. 

Photographic guru's understand the challenge of selecting a suitable shutter speed under twilight conditions, allowing sufficient 'exposure' onto the sensor in the shortest possible time, resulting in the perfect still action shot without motion blur. 

Similarly, in mission critical CCTV applications moving objects are of utmost importance and short exposure times are essential to understand what's going on.

The brand-new 6MP cameras have an outstanding increase of light sensitivity of more than 100-times than the former 3MP cameras. The monochrome version reaches even a 300-times higher sensitivity than the previous series. Instead of one full second of exposure time the new 6MP systems can select only 1/100 s which results in capturing even fast moving objects in low light conditions.

In security and operational monitoring every moment and therefore every single frame of a video recording has to be as sharp as possible. For moving objects this implies the necessity of short instead of long exposure times. Unfortunately a short exposure time of 1/100 s grabs 10-times less light than a 1/10 s. In low light conditions, the lens, the image sensor itself and the image processor have to be very sophisticated to generate a sharp and crisp image of the moving object.

Optimized for Best Performance

This huge increase in light sensitivity was achieved by several means; wider sensor with bigger pixels to catch more light, a hardware noise reduction filter directly at the sensor, a new sophisticated lens with a better light transmission, and an improved image processing software reducing the noise of low light images. This is called the new Moonlight Technology.

See our demonstration video here.