The Skinny on Image Sensors

Image sensors function much like a human eye, absorbing and converting light from the environment around us into digital signals, assembling the images, processing, storing, and sending. There are currently four major types of image sensor: photomultiplier tubes (PMT) that are rarely used now and reserved almost exclusively for specialist applications, charge-coupled devices (CCD) that were responsible for the popularization of digital imaging and are now the mainstream sensor for higher quality imaging devices, contact image sensors (CIS) that were originally used in fax machines and have some limited applications in sheetfed scanners, and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors that trade image quality for a higher degree of integration and lower cost that makes them suitable for mobile communications and lower-end products.

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