For the past few years, photographers (including me) have been saying that we need to go back to CCD sensors. The only ones saying that we shouldn’t do that are product managers, photographers who only shoot in low light or know how to use a flash, and those of us who also make a lot of video. But the CCD sensor is capable of far more than we knew: including a big thing that most photographers forgot about or never even knew.
What am I talking about? Rolling shutter. Sure, CCD sensors didn’t do a great job with high ISO output and after a while, the really good CMOS sensors outdid what CCD sensors could do in post-production. At the same time, where the CMOS was negative film, the CCD was positive film. You essentially had to get it right in-camera.
CCDs, because of how they make photos, suffer from no issues around rolling shutter. Rolling shutter typically happens with panning subjects and is solved with a global shutter.
So hear me out: what if CCDs just had better processors to make high ISO noise less of an issue? Then you wouldn’t even need a global shutter. And you’d have a camera meant for photographers first and foremost. Well, the camera manufacturers would tell you that camera prices would go up.
But would they really? They already sometimes mark the prices down so low that you wouldn’t believe. And they already make higher profits.
Why can’t they just cut down on their profits a bit more and actually innovate? The truth is that the brands could do it. They just don’t want to cut back a bit on their profits even though they’re all mostly in the billions of dollars.
Where I think that this could really work, however, is with medium format. Medium format cameras already have their own Cinema bodies. So why not a body just for stills? Hasselblad does this already though even so, I don’t think that there are enough. The truth is though that CCDs are pretty much stated to give us the best possible image quality at lower megapixels.
Let’s think about this some more though: can any of us really tell the difference between a CCD and a CMOS sensor output at all?
And to answer that, I’ll make a statement: none of us can tell the difference between Canon, Nikon, and Sony camera output. So if that’s the case, why does it matter?
That’s because of the workflow method. CCD sensors often did much better work at lower ISOs than CMOS sensors did. There was a point where CMOS sensors threw the rules of photography pretty much out the window — yet photographers didn’t know what to do with them. A good point here is with the a9 III’s global shutter: how many photographers know how to use the flash settings around it to create something that can’t be done? But when the high ISO wars started, photographers made images that weren’t possible before because they weren’t all trying to copy one another on social media.
And that, ultimately settles my point: we need to change how we work and I don’t think that just using lower ISO settings on cameras is going to cut it.