Position sensitive detectors for synchrotron radiation studies: the tortoise and the hare?

The huge gulf between the high photon fluxes available from synchrotrons and the capabilities of detectors to measure the resulting photon, electron or ion signals is well known. Whilst accelerator technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, it is detector performance which represents the limiting factor for many synchrotron experiments. In some cases there are still single channel counting detectors based on 40-year-old designs operational on synchrotron beamlines. The dream of many researchers is a detector which is able to simultaneously image and perform spectroscopy at the required data rates. A solution is the massive integration of parallel electronics into detectors on a pixel by pixel basis. These ideas have been in gestation for very many years awaiting sufficient funding, nevertheless, several prototypes are now at the testing stage. The current status of these and other detector developments targeted at synchrotron science are briefly reviewed.