- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.; New edition edition (7 April 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0393328414
- ISBN-13: 978-0393328417
- Product Dimensions: 1.9 x 13.3 x 19.7 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,467,959 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
"Proof that the spell of the Valley, after decades of booms and busts, is alive and well." Washington Post "Like Foveon's founders, Mr Gilder wants to understand vision, albeit of a different kind: the vision of innovators... The unpredictable disorder of markets is, in Microsoft parlance, not a bug but a feature. That's a lesson that Mr Gilder's book drives home." The Wall Street Journal"
Product Description
Thanks to the digital technology revolution, cameras are everywhere - PDAs, mobile phones, anywhere you can put an imaging chip and a lens. Battling to usurp the market is a Silicon Valley company, Foveon, whose technology not only produces a superior image, but also may become the eye in artificially intelligent machines. Behind Foveon are two legendary figures who made the personal computer possible: Carver Mead of Caltech, one of the founding fathers of information technology, and Federico Faggin, inventor of the CPU - the chip that runs every computer. George Gilder has an insider's knowledge of Silicon Valley and the unpredictable mix of genius, drive and luck that can turn a start-up company into a world leader. "The Silicon Eye" focuses on some of the brightest - and most colourful - people on earth and their race to transform an industry.
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First Sentence
Carver Mead's path to the Foveon camera began one spring day in 1967 when Max Delbrück burst open for Mead the door between physics and biology. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Carver Mead's path to the Foveon camera began one spring day in 1967 when Max Delbrück burst open for Mead the door between physics and biology. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2.6 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gilder successfully chronicles an important technology advance, 2 Aug 2005
By David S. Hirschman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras and Cell Phones Obsolete (Enterprise) (Hardcover)
In "The Silicon Eye" George Gilder relates another colorful story of a significant technology breakthrough, namely, a camera imaging chip that is greatly superior to everything else out there. Standard imagers work by separating the three primary colors, throwing away 2/3 of the color information at each point in the visual field, and must use software processing to interpolate the missing data. The Foveon chip is a major advancement because it can collect 100% of the color information at each point using a single-chip solution that will provide smaller and cheaper imaging that is of both higher quality and lower power consumption. The photo samples on Foveon's web site are truly astounding.But Gilder's book over-hypes the significance of the technology. It will not "Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete." Cameras, yes. And cell phones and computers will benefit greatly from the smaller, lighter, cheaper, lower power consumption, and higher image quality aspects of the Foveon chip. But the Foveon chip is not a "Silicon Eye" as Gilder suggests. The chip does not "see" the way a biological eye does - it merely records images as all cameras do. The story of Foveon's initial forays into AI and producing silicon chips that mimic brain functions is fascinating, but as Gilder describes, Foveon finally had to abandon such speculative research in favor of a viable commercial product.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting story, but a hard slog to read for the non-specialist, 28 Jan 2009
By Thomas H. Burroughes "Bookish" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation (Enterprise (W.W. Norton Paperback)) (Paperback)
I got a copy of this book as I have been a fan of Gilder's previous books on supply-side economics in the 1980s and since. It was interesting to read about how visual imaging technologies have developed. We take for granted such amazing technologies such as digital cameras and so on. I am afraid that for all Gilder's skills as a writer, I found some of the details of how this material works hard to follow. Specialists might find it interesting, but I struggled with it.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Questionable accuracy, 26 April 2007
By A. Sparks - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation (Enterprise (W.W. Norton Paperback)) (Paperback)
My company was working with Foveon chips, so I was interested to read this book. The book itself was fine, but my distributer said it was so inaccurate that Foveon won't even comment anymore. Foveon chips take great pictures, by the way.
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