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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (204165)	9/28/2004 2:14:35 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577836

Well, there is an OVTI thread, but I'll put in a little plug here: Interesting... Do they have any customers? Their main business at the moment is image sensors for camera phones. They supply 5 of the top 6 cell phone manufacturers (not yet NOK). They had a huge business in low end digital camera chips, but concentrated on the cell phone biz and they haven't announced a new digital camera chip for about a year (until this one). Competitors? Plenty. But as far as the total image sensor market goes (mainly digital cameras and camera phones) they are either #1 or #2 depending on who you talk to. Others are MU, A, and some Japanese/Korean companies. MU should have some interesting image sensor commentary when they report tomorrow. The digital camera I bought recently can do 30 fps VGA and is 5 megapixel - Sony P-100 (or something like that). Is it possible it uses this chip? No this chip is new. This chip is CMOS. The high end stuff in your Sony is probably CCD (primarily Japanese chip companies). OVTI's story is that CMOS is cheaper than CCD, but is further behind the technology curve. So as soon as OVTI can get a 5 megapixel chip to work using CMOS, they eat up share from the CCD chip companies because the CMOS chip is cheaper. For exmample, 5 Megapixel cameras have been around for 12-24 months, and probably all use CCD chips. Now that OVTI can do the same thing with a CMOS chip, they will gain share from the CCD companies because their chip is less expensive. As long as the sweet spot doesn't suddenly move to 6 megapixel chips (which OVTI can't make yet) they should be OK. But camera phones are the bigger story, at least in the near term. Elroy