iPhone 7 Plus Digital Camera Focal Plane Sensor Chips Showing Pixel-To-Pixel Noise

Happy Macro Mondays, HMM!

I no longer have any electronic components at hand, and I was reluctant to destroy any image storage cards.. However, I have often been intrigued by the pixel-to-pixel noise on the focal plane sensor chips in modern digital cameras. To bring out the details, I photographed the side of a black bookcase illuminated by very dim light where sensor residual noise is most pronounced.

I recommend moving back away from your monitor. That seems to help to see the vertical lines and, to a lesser degree, the horizontal lines.

The effect is more visible in the smaller image in the comments below.

I processed the resulting noise using the filters in Apple's Photos app followed by the filters in Adobe's PS Express app on my iPhone 7 Plus.

By moving your eye around, you should see vertical and horizontal lines forming squares. These are some of the sensor chip boundaries or leakage drain channels in my iPhone 7 Plus digital camera.

I have cropped quite a bit!

We are looking at the iPhone 7 Plus Digital Camera’s Focal Plane Sensor Chips Showing Pixel-To-Pixel Noise.

This particular photo is just an elementary engineering study to evaluate the impact of pixel-to-pixel noise at low illumination levels of the sensor chips in my iPhone's camera... It is suggestive but not definitive since I don't have the tools to measure these variations, so I am just trying to make them more visible. The camera's software tries to make the pixel-to-pixel residual differences less noticeable. I guess I am really attempting to undo the camera's smoothing software. I was delighted that the chip boundaries stood out so clearly on my iPhone's screen. I had forgotten about them...;))
In addition, I have made no attempt to adjust my computer monitor to make this more visible. And, the visibility will vary for each individual viewer's monitor.


When time permits I will show some of the dozens of screen captures of all the processing app filters I used to bring out the chip boundaries.

This result worked for me. I expect that each viewer will see the chip boundaries most clearly in their own favorite filter combo.

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