How to make a Mono Camera!

MacM545 wrote:

I read about how someone was able to safely remove the CFA from a sensor. https://hackaday.com/2021/08/09/using-a-laser-to-blast-away-a-bayer-array/

Interesting. His intro gets a few basic things disturbingly wrong, such as describing the RGGB pattern as one pixel, when it's actually four pixels.

A few years ago, I tried to clean fungus from a lens using a LED laser from a laser cutter. It instantly carbonized the fugus spot, but also melted a spot in the glass. Most such LED lasers are around 405nm and between 0.3 and 10W; I believe the one we used was my 2.5W (2500mW). The passivation layer on a typical chip is a bit more robust than optical glass, but I'm honestly surprised this isn't causing serious damage.... I'm assuming the microlenses are obliterated by this.

The microlenses may be offset , so removing them can be a good idea if the lens is changed... and that's a problem I've been dealing with using ESP32-CAM.

This can allow for various applications, including scientific. It can be especially helpful for astrophotography especially if the camera can also be made to be cooled by cryogenic means. Both of these methods put to use can significantly increase the SNR ratio. I myself have truly considered doing such modifications to a camera.

Not so sure this stripping helps SNR -- probably not. Microlenses increase fill factor. Beyond that, the on-chip processing likely compensates for the expected differences in color channel sensitivity. For that matter, it didn't look like he was getting much wider spectral range by doing this; lots of cameras can see a wider range than what he got with the Pi camera treated this way.

Cooling a low-end sensor doesn't help much either, and cooling too much easily causes condensation, thermal contraction/expansion problems, and other nasty issues.

For UV photography, I was wondering how easy and affordable it might be to make a quartz lens.

You can buy elements, but it's not cheap... e.g., check out Edmund optics. Actually, NUV achromatic lenses cost about the same as single elements.