Originally Posted by
Ben Syverson
That's not my understanding of the situation at all.
As I understand it, the larger the IC, the greater the chance of a defect in any given IC. That's why it's cheap to make 1/2" sensors—you can cram a bunch of them on a 300mm wafer, and just throw away the few that don't pass QC. In contrast, if you can only fit one gigantic 4x5" IC on a wafer, it's virtually guaranteed to have a large number of defects.
It has nothing to do with "demand." There is huge demand for full frame 35mm sensors, yet they still cost orders of magnitude more than the sensors in compact cameras. That's because as IC area increases, manufacturing costs go up exponentially, not linearly.
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