Any questions? ...*hands go up any questions not about my shirt? ...*hands go down...

I'd expect the main reason why Perseverance sent black and white images first even though they were taken with color cameras was because they need less bandwidth and there was a ton of other things they needed Perseverance to transmit after landing.

"its very easy to get a rock to sit still" -Scott Manley, ca. 2021

“..that’s 65% more sensor per sensor! Scott Manley, we’re done here!” Seriously though, thank you for another great explainer, Scott!

Scott Manley: Answering the Spaceflight Questions I Always Wondered but Never Asked since 2011!

The death of CCD really came with the advent of backthinned CMOS, where the light enters the back of the chip, rather than the front where all the circuitry is. This, paired with microlens arrays to focus the light into the center of each photodiode, has given backthinned CMOS the same quantum efficiency as CCD with MUCH higher frame rates. EMCCD is the only remaining CCD sensor that doesn't have a superior equivalent in CMOS, but is for fairly specialized applications.

I bet Scott didn't even have to research much for this since he already does astrophotography. You learn a lot about sensors from the start diving into that hobby

"That's how old cameras used to operate, and they were really hard to calibrate." I repaired camcorders back in the 80's and 90's. The old tube cameras weren't hard to calibrate, they were a load of fun....that lasted for an hour or so, lol. Each color had 9 adjustment to align that were all interconnected, so after you aligned all 9, you had to go back and do it again, and again until it zeroed into the right position.

Not just space probes - science, generally. Optical filters give you way more control over the spectrum you're sampling, so a monochrome sensor with a calibrated QE curve is pretty much all you need to do whatever spectral imaging you need.

I will file this away under my folder of “Scott Manley Videos to Throw at Conspiracy Theorists”

Obviously they take B&W photos because that's how a true artiste expresses their work. Duh.

Internet: "I want to see Mars in colour!" NASA: "Pff you can barely see in colour on Earth"

I'm a long-time lurker and don't often comment, but I'm inspired to drop in a thank you for the videos you create and the depth of information you have and impart. I'm a photographer and today's video is kinda my thing and has been for a long time. And still, you taught me a couple of things today that I hadn't put together myself before. Kudos, Scott. You genuinely are one of the greatest educators of our time, and you deserve recognition.

I remember when I was first getting into astrophotography that there were a few other differences that made CCDs a little more desirable. One was that CMOS as Scott noted are active pixels, which means they have current flowing through them during exposure. This leads to the chip heating up as you do an exposure (or take a video). For astrophotography, that means if you're not actively cooling your chip when you take pictures, thermal noise increases as you go until your chip reaches thermal equilibrium. CCDs on the other hand are only active when you're scanning the chip at the end of the exposure, and dont' heat up for long exposures. Also CMOS pixels are read individually and have slight differences between pixels in sensitivity, and need to be recalibrated after construction, which can make them problematic for photometry. On the other hand CCDs do suffer from blooming, where a saturated "well" spills its electrons into the neighbor wells. This is why you see super bright objects (like planets) having horizontal lines coming off of them in images from probes like SOHO.

If you could address every diode junction on your solar panel you would have a giant photo chip.

Happy user of Monochrome sensors at work. Helped build the hardware behind some Back illuminated CCD’s used in research. And they love being cold, very cold. Our warmest camera runs at -110C coldest at -170C

“It’s very easy to get a rock to sit still.” This is the scientific breakdown we came here for lol! Love you Scott!

Let's not forget the two Viking Mars-landers, which had a pair of rather unusual facsimile cameras, and Pioneers 10 & 11 which exploited the spin of the spacecraft to construct images of Jupiter and Saturn with two-channel imaging photopolarimeters.

If I ever want to think I am not very smart, I will listen to Scott Manley describe how cameras work and I will forever be amazed at what engineers have done to design cameras.

CCD cameras also can have the problem of "flooding" a full column of pixels if some of the pixels get a huge amount of photons(pointing at the sun or if you over expose the pixels).

Alone in the bath, listening to Scott...every single man's Saturday night dream 🙃

I very much appreciate Scott saying “iPhone eks” instead of “ten” and even more appreciate that he doesn’t feel the need to wave around the absolute latest phone model

Quote of the day: "It's very easy to get a rock to sit still for its portrait"

I really appreciate you've mentioned Sigma's Foveon sensor! Back in the day I recommended to buy sigma dp1 to my father and even though it had only 5 Mpx sensor, his photos had outstanding color rendering with especially pleasant blue sky, which non of Bayer cameras were able to picture.

Sorry, but imma have to watch this a second time. The first time I wasn't listening because I was trying to decipher your shirt.

I was just wondering why I watch videos explaining things I already know, and then this video answered my question: They sometimes include plenty of things I don't know.

Thanks for explaining the camera technologies. I found it absolutely fascinating!

Video and audio might be one of the most underrated modern technologies. Most people do not have the slightest idea how complex they are and how they actually work.

Most underrated channel on UKposts.

A polarizer would make an interesting filter choice, in combination with the other filters...

Thanks Scott for this 15 minute crash course in sensor technology and what you can do with it! Very informative! !

Fascinating. Thank you. Some of this I've heard before but it was great to hear it all again in the context of space craft.

A small disclaimer : when you say a "Pixel" (in a typical bayer matrix) it's actually composed of four photosites, and when you talk about only one of those four, you just call it a photosite. Also English made a bit of a mouthful, because when you are talking about the number of pixels a sensor have, it isn't resolution, but the definition. Resolution is the ability to resolve fine details, and is linked to the size of the photosites over the actual size of your sensor, not the number of them. Also when talking about definition, it's related to the dimensions, or the numbers of raws of pixel display for the final image, some sensor or imaging technique used more (or less) than one pixels from the sensor to make one pixel displyed on a screen for the final image. Finally, a lot of CDD's are much tougher than CMOS and more reliable, are less sensitive from radiations, and some specialize CDD still have an edge in signal to noise ratio (especially in extreme temperatures), so that's why their still used in industries and space related activities. PS : no digital sensor can replicate the human perception of color, some film stocks can get close, but our brain is just too messy, color rendition isn't even fixed, when you see a bright color, or a monochromatic color, you brain adapts for it, and try to make it white-ish. (I've done the experiment, I was facing a powerfull really deep red light, and 30min later I was seeying a pale orange, it took me a pause to the toilet form the shooting, and actually coming back to the studio to realize it was note pale orange but deep red again.)

13:50 Thats exactly how high efficiency solar panels work, too. They have multiple layers to try and soak up as many different wavelengths of the sunlight at the same time as possible.

I think this is your best video yet: a great explanation of a space engineering concept but with a strong connection to everyday technology as a point of reference. Sometimes explanations about technologies only used for space/industrial purposes are hard to understand because there's nothing to relate to. Thanks and hopefully there are more of these in the future!

one of the most interesting informative videos you've made in a while, for a space nerd like me it was amazing to realize how complex a whole subject i haven't noticed is

6:02 You can also see these shifted color channel on Google Maps/Earth when there is an airplane flying between the camera and the ground. Also if people wanna know how analog TV cameras work, Veritasium has a great video on that.

Couple of things to note: it's also possible to take pictures with no filter selected. And in this case, it's not called 'black and white' or 'monochromatic', it's called 'panchromatic', as it represents all of the colors. If you're taking separate images with red, green, and blue filters, you can also take a fourth (panchromatic) image with no filter and then combine the brightness data from the panchromatic image with the color data from the other three images. This potentially provides better signal to noise ratio, although the image may also include non-visible light (IR and UV). In some cases, the panchromatic image is captured at a higher resolution (and possibly with a completely different sensor or camera) than the filtered images.

The depth of your knowledge never fails to amaze me Scott!

Great explanation of a complex topic! Thank you!

I wonder if there’s a setup for the Raspberry Pi that uses a B&W sensor and a color filter so that one could mimic the spacecraft cameras in operation? I would enjoy programming that setup...

Remember analogue video? The Luminance (brightness) signal always uses much more of the overall bandwidth than the Chrominance (colour) signal does. NTSC technicians based this on the fact that human eyes are really bad at seeing details in colour and dedicating more of the signal to colour was a waste.

That was super complex but loved the way you described it! THanks for posting :) awesome

Thank you Commander Manley! This was very informative and well presented.

I had always assumed that black and white was more accurate and more amenable to image processing.

Forgot about one technology, the 3ccd sensor that used a prism to split light to an r,g &b sensor.

Brilliant informative stuff as ever! Thanks Scott.

Bet you glad to get through that one Scott, the smile at the end gave it away. Great video thanks.

This all reminds me of that old spacecraft camera that had a green lens cylinder, red lens cylinder, and blue lens cylinder next to each other and it would just take the three images and overlay them like Scott mentioned. It might’ve been Hubble

When the company I work for was moving away from 3CCD cameras (which I'm surprised you didn't mention) I advocated for switching to the FOVEON technology. Athough there was too many draw backs as you pointed out. We ended up going with combination of Bayer and filter wheel depending on the application. Although we have recently also starting using multicolored lamp houses with RGB LEDS, which wouldn't work for most space applications because you're using ambient light.

Hello Scott, Thanks for a great video. Keep well, keep safe and be happy.

Best video I've seen all week. More please!

Anyone who has done serious astrophotography understands the overall advantage of wideband monochrome CCD cameras with filters, over the RGB CCDs. Many of the monochrome CCD can "see" a ways into both the infrared and ultraviolet, well beyond human perception. Some filters are designed to exploit that.

Fascinating! Clicked to learn about Perseverance, stayed to learn about image processing.

I took a class about all of this stuff last semester! You recapped it pretty well.

outstanding explanation. Thank you for this.

I know from reading that NOAA APT weather satellites use nIR to approximate the green components of the image data.

I am obsessed by the message on your t-shirt ...

Thanks Scott, you have and excellent way of expanding our knowledge on how things work.

Thank you so much, I have always wondered about this but was too afraid to ask.

I'm in astrophotography from 1y (because of your 5$ scope video btw) so I understand quite a bit of this video :p anyway I'm gonna share this to my friends on my favorite social media to create some "mise en abyme" (comme nous disons aussi en france entre deux baguettes et deux drapeaux blancs ) Anyway, TY Mr Manley

Scott, what's that shirt referencing?

Great video as always Thanks for sharing :-)

Thank you, I have always been curious about this.

For the three layer color sensors discussed at the end, wouldn't it make sense to also do the checkerboard pattern for each layer, so you can better guess at the intensities of each color, and you also get direct measurements of the color one pixel over? Idk if that makes sense to anyone...

The new mars rover, scoot manley

Thanks again Scott!

dude - absolutely love it. I had no idea there is so much going on with the various digital image sensors.

I thought for sure you'd mention that high-quality amateur telescope cameras are monochromatic, and that you can buy narrow-band filters to create false-color imagery. I would be inclined to think you own one, being the kind of guy you are.

Whats that shirt?

Love coming here and learning actual real stuff, from someone with real knowledge. Thank you for sharing all this!

Another fascinating video. Tanks a bunch!

This is like reverse click-bait. The title makes the video sound boring as hell but the actual video is great

Either Apple is no longer paying well or UKposts urgently needs more money: UKposts tried to run ads 4 times during this video! (and failed)

Thanks for the camera lesson.

Great information!...thanks for posting...

My boi Scott works for Apple and pronounces the X in iPhone X as “ex” and not 10🧐

Ironically there is a meme like Full HD camera on mars rovers but crap quality surveillance cameras in the banks/ATM's

I actually learned something new, nice! Thanks, Scott!

While I knew the reason, I could never have explained so well or with quite so much additional details. Thanks!

To be "more" correct. Monochrome cameras... One color at a time.

Wow this is the soonest I ever got here

Thanks Scott. Enjoyed this a lot. Interesting to follow as I recently started astrophotography and there were clearly a lot of common threads to the spacecraft cameras!

Thanks for the Image of Iridian Spectral Technologies Optical Filters Scott!

That shirt looks familiar. Can anyone tell me what thats about?

I hate it when people say "wow we've spent billions of dollars of taxpayers money but we've only seen black and white images" people really need to know that just because you don't know what something is, doesn't mean it doesn't exist

Thx, very good explanation of the whole Colour vs Monochrome issue.

Awesome explanatory video!

Come people let perserverancy clear his eyes he got dust all over them

Quickest fan lol, just kidding

you are very good on explaining complex things in an easy manner. Congratulations and thank you! PS waiting for KSP2 rsrsrs!

With Scott you always learn something new!

Pog First

I think that was the best explanation of that topic I've ever heard... fascinating!

Scott this has got to be your best video ever! It's very technical and very revealing at the same time. I do astrophotography and I knew about this process CCD and CMOS. It's very telling when the public doesn't understand. Thank you very much keep up the good work

Excellent explanation! thanks.

You didn't mention 3CCD/3CMOS type sensors, usually found in pro-video type cameras which have a prism arrangement to split the red/green/blue colours to 3 separate monochrome sensors.

Hey Scott, another form of sensor that is very interesting is MKIDs. They’re very new, and are very well suited for research-level astronomy on large telescopes. They’re cooled to millikelvin temperatures, and each pixel can count individual photons, and determine the energy of the photon simultaneously. So it’s kinda like an array of tiny spectrophotometers. I don’t fully understand the technology, but I thought I’d share.

I head up the test division for a company that makes CMOS color sensors. I know more about human perception of color than I ever dreamed I would. Very well explained. I’m impressed by the broad extent of your knowledge.

You never disappoint Mr Manley. Loved all the research you did for this.