Technology and Innovation

CMOS: Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor. You may be familiar with it from digital still cameras. This more affordable chip consumes less power and contains electronics that convert the analog information from the pixels to a digital form. This conversion must be performed off-chip in CCD sensors.
SNR: Signal-to-Noise Ratio. The higher the SNR, the cleaner the image; the lower the SNR, the more noise. Smaller pixels, relatively speaking, have a lower SNR than bigger pixels.

CCD: Charge-Coupled Device that is used to detect light, but not color, in video and digital still cameras. On their own, most sensors would detect only black-and-white images. To achieve full color, filters are used on the chips, either spread out evenly (three-CCD Red, Blue and Green, using dichroic filters in a prism) or on each pixel (one-CCD via colored filters).