Low cost monochrome solid state camera for consumer applications

A simple monochrome charge-coupled device (CCD) camera was designed using a standard solid-state image sensor. For applications which do not need very high resolution a special signal-processing circuit is proposed that utilizes only the low-frequency components of the CCD-sensor´s output signal. This allows the use of sensors with reduced picture quality on ones with minor defects. A camera that uses this special combining network and an additional lowpass filter was designed and tested. Sensors with defects, which can not be used in standard applications, were tested. The tests demonstrated, that the influence of minor defects is low enough to fulfil the requirements of many consumer applications.