Nikon D1 - Development and Its Significance Plus Its Sensor Design

Development and Its Significance Plus Its Sensor Design

Development began on the D1 in 1996, when digital imaging was in its infancy in the consumer market. At that time the major market leader for DSLR cameras was Kodak, who produced their own image sensors and assembled digital cameras under the brand Kodak DCS. The DCS cameras were based upon 35 mm SLR cameras, replacing the film back with one incorporating a CCD sensor. This in turn was connected to a power supply and image processing and storage unit that was either carried separately or attached to the base of the camera body. While these cameras offered the convenience of digital imaging to normal photographers, their appeal was limited by huge price-tags and issues with sensor size, resolution, and performance in comparison to film.

Nikon therefore stood to gain a significant market advantage if they could manage to offer a digital camera that had been designed from the ground up. The goal was ambitious; Nikon sought to produce professional-grade cameras using large high-resolution sensors for only a few thousand dollars at a time when the Kodak DCS 460, based on a Nikon F90X and provided with a 6 megapixel 27.6 × 18.4 mm CCD sensor, was retailing for over US$30,000. Price was just one of the hurdles encountered; engineers also had to consider how to design and mass-produce a high-resolution and high-sensitivity sensor that could be powered by batteries and sustain a continuous frame-rate suitable for journalistic use.

Initially no major sensor manufacturer was prepared to produce the sensor for Nikon, believing that the predicted sales volumes were completely unrealistic. Eventually though a foundry was located and prototype designs entered production. Several years of refinement followed - working to reduce power use and improve read speeds - until a design was perfected.

The final design that was used in the D1 was for a 23.7 × 15.6 mm CCD producing images with a final resolution of 2000 × 1312 pixels (approximately 2.7 megapixels), and this was the figure used for marketing the camera. The sensor was praised for its high base sensitivity of ISO 200, its excellent signal-to-noise ratio especially at base sensitivity, and its capacity for continuous shooting at five frames per second.

At the time, Bjørn Rørslett famously stated that the camera spelled "The End of The Beginning (of the digital era) - The Beginning of The End (of the film era)". The development of the D1 is generally accepted as one of the major milestones in the development of the digital camera, and Kodak's initial market dominance was genuinely threatened for the first time.

In a later "behind the scenes" interview published on the Nikon website it was revealed by the General Manager of Nikon's Imaging Development Management Department that the sensor developed for and used in the D1, and subsequently the D1H, actually utilised 10.8 million photosites rather than the 2.7 million that had previously been suggested. This allowed multiple photosites to be grouped together into units that formed the final pixels in the image, contributing to the sensor's high sensitivity and excellent SNR.