Primer on Film and Digital Capture by Rob Hummel

[Steaphany]

[chrisc]

This will come in handy the next time I get into an argument with a digi-head who never shot film...didn't know about the gamma rays and flying but then I've only flown once in the last 40 years.

[Steaphany]

Chris,

Your comment regarding the impacts a high altitude flight radiation exposure on digital camera imagers prompted me to do some research.

First off, none of the CCD and CMOS imager chip manufactures provide any warnings regarding this potential problem. From my own semiconductor engineering background, unless a chip is being used close to a radiation source, such as the electronic instrumentation used to monitor a nuclear reactor core, or on space craft in orbit around Jupiter or Saturn, The effects of radiation aren't usually worried about. The greatest impact would simply result in transient effects from liberated charges and junctions between structures within the chip becoming less effective in electrical isolation.

and I remembered watching a video of a camera being bombarded by high energy neutrons.
Just watch how the imager continues to work fine after each transient effect:

and here is a direct example where a camera records video of a radiation detector while in flight:

Hmmm, not even a single column goes bad in the camera.

Now what if we put a camera out in space, well beyond the orbit of the International Space Station, at the L1 Lagrange point is SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, a project of international collaboration between ESA and NASA to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind. SOHO observes the Sun continuously and here is a video from the SOHO web site:

Watch and note the radiation storms that hit the probe and camera at 2001/04/03 08:00, 2001/04/10 00:00, and finally at 2001/04/15 19:30. Obviously there are a nearly constant flow on radiation impacts, and WOW, the camera keeps on working.

I'm suspecting something else went wrong with those professional camera shipped by air that Rob Hummel mentions in the original video.

Finally, ESO, the European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world's most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes has this article online regarding ways in which imagers can fail:

CCD Artifacts

and they don't even go into permanent radiation induced damage. Remember, their cameras are on telescopes are in the high altitude of the Atacama Desert region of Chile.