Dream becomes reality: Sony officially unveils their curved sensor tech!

Imagine a sensor that has no light loss on corners, no aberrations. A sensor designed to allow faster apertures without to sacrifice image quality. Such a sensor would have to be curved to allow all this. Well, this is no more science fiction. Sony officially unveiled their curved sensor tech! And suddenly the hopes are high Sony uses this kind of tech on future RX or Full Frame E-mount cameras. This is the Sony presentation published right before the start of the Technology Symposium (pdf file here):

We realized an ultimately advanced imaging system that comprises a curved, back-illuminated CMOS image sensor (BIS) and integrated lens which doubles the sensitivity at the edge of the image circle and increases the sensitivity at the center of the image circle by a factor of 1.4 with one-fifth lower dark current than that of a planar BIS. Because the lens field curvature aberration was overcome in principle by the curved sensor itself, the curved BIS enables higher system sensitivity through design of a brighter lens with a smaller F number than is possible with a planar BIS. At the same time, we controlled the tensile stress of the BIS chip to produce a curved shape that widens the energy band-gap to obtain a lower dark current. The curved CIS can be applied to an ultimately advanced imaging system that is validated by the evolution of the animal eye in Nature.

If Sony is going to put this into a mass production camera…it will really put under pressure Canon and Nikon ;)