Digital BW, The Print

Claude,

> All?  Possible?  That's simply not true.  There are no gallium arsenide
> computer chips in %99.9999999 of modern computers, these chips (processor,
> memory, chipsets etc.) are silicon based.
> You missed the comma I placed between arsenide and VLSI. Most of
> the large
> scale integration today is in CMOS, as are the Foveon sensors.

But Carver Mead did NOT "invent" VLSI.  It's simply a name, there is nothing
to invent.  So what if most LSI chips are CMOS, Mead didn't have anything to
do with CMOS.

> As to overstating his accomplshments, Carver received the coveted
> Lemelson
> prize from MIT in 1999,

That's actually kind of funny that Mead would get a "Lemelson Prize".  I'd
suggest you do some research into who Lemelson was, and what he did.  But,
none the less...

> the year I met him. So there's a half
> million reasons
> why I disagree with your opinion on my "overstatment of his
> accomplishments."

Receiving an award does not in any way show that all your claims of Mead's
accomplishments were true, as they simply were not.  It shows he received an
award.  He IS a very bright guy, and he has made very good contributions to
technology, no doubt.

> As to my co-incidental mention of the X3 development, I had read
> about the
> depth properties of silicon in some Kodak white papers some years ago. I
> mentioned the idea in some my daily Emails, which went unanswered
> for some time. They
> later told me that I had caused them to have a meeting about a "possible
> leak" since they were concurrently working on the patents and
> aquiring other
> patents on this idea, hence the word "co-incidental." There's a
> big difference
> between words in an Email and committing $50 million in R&D, so I have no
> pretenses about any contributions. However, Foveon's chief
> engineer did admit to my
> idea being "prescient" in later correspondences.

OK, if you say so ;-)

> I'm just a owrking photographer with a former
> electronics background. I'm not trying to overimpress anyone, I
> just sell prints for a
> living in the portrait market.

Then why the sycophantic demur about Mead?  It's kind of weird, in fact.

> I still think that by way of the "no color filter or fuzzy
> filter" approach
> to the SD-9 and the new improved SD-10 makes for sharper images
> in color and
> B&W than their Bayer/AA filtered counterparts.

The sensor type (stacked vs mosaic) has not a single thing to do with
sharpness, it has to do with color fidelity, which are two separate things.

> I have owned all of them and made sold prints from all of them. I
> am not a
> theorist, I'm a doer. Light control, composition, and marketing
> are far more
> important than recording and scanning devices. The most important
> of all is
> making out bank deposit slips. The least important is being an
> argumentative
> technical elitist.

I'm not a technical elitist at all, just someone who has been designing
digital imaging systems for over 25 years, and knows first hand with some
reasonably high degree of certainty, through thousands of hours of
experimentation and first hand experience, what is true, and what isn't.

For some reason, some people *need* to overstate the capabilities of digital
cameras (wasn't it you who made some claim about a digital P&S being better
than any film camera in another group?), and it seems more so about the
Foveon.  It's like people *want* it to be more than it is...  It is what it
is, and if it works great for you, that's great (and all that should matter
to you).

Regards,

Austin