What does backside illumination mean

At MegaPixels, these are the highest resolution BSI digital camera sensors available on the market. The increased light reaching a BSI sensor manifests itself in numerous, interrelated ways. The most obvious is increased low-light sensitivity.

You can shoot with lower ambient light and see more detail, better color, and more natural tonal transitions in the shadows of your images. This also means less noise at higher ISO, creating a more usable breadth of situations for your photography.

You can see what this new sensor technology means to you by attending one of our roadshows or arranging a private demo evaluation. All sensors have light-sensitive photosites. This means that only a percentage of the sensor surface is actually light sensitive — some of it is wasted by the circuitry in front. Ideally, there should be no gaps at all between the photosites, so that the photosites are as large and efficient as possible.

Engineers realised they could do this by flipping the sensor around so that it is illuminated from the back, where there is no circuitry and the photosites can be made with no gaps. During the integration of this new sensor, many have thought its design was quite too complicated at the time hence manufacturing it in the market was only limited to microscopes, security cameras, astronomy sensors, and among others that require specialized usage on catching images during low light.

However, companies eventually took notice of its potential and decided to develop a plan that can make them produce the sensors on a larger scale.

Their efforts bore fruits when the 5-megapixel BI CMOS sensor was finally brought to the public in and ever since then, BSI sensors became a commonplace on portable devices such as compact cameras and smartphones.

Back-side illuminated sensors have been known to provide an 8dB improvement, which can be considered to be a significant breakthrough in the field of image sensor development. Most cameras boasting BSI sensors have undergone several tests conducted by DxOMark labs that suggests some substantial improvement in lowering the digital noise levels.

The effect is observed among higher end cameras which boasts advanced features such as JPEG noise reduction. Capturing images with amazing quality that ranges around ISO or higher are not an impossibility anymore.