One of the interesting things that's changed some since that article was written has been the advent of truly itsy-bitsy sensors, for instance on cell phone cam

One of the interesting things that's changed some since that article was written has been the advent of truly itsy-bitsy sensors, for instance on cell phone cameras. Sony, OmniVision, and Aptina are all making sensors on the scale of 1/3", with pixel sizes as small as 1.1µm; the upshot of this is that the electrons wells for these pixels are fantastically tiny, and saturate well below 2,000 electrons. This means that even on a bright, sunny day, with brilliant opportunities to pour light into the sensor while maintaining short exposure times, we /still/ can't get as much light in as we want, because if we do, we'll saturate the pixels -- and no amount of lowering the analog gain in the readout circuitry will recover the electrons that spilled out of the wells. So, we end up with shot noise as a dominating factor for cell phone images, even in "perfect" conditions. As we cram more pixels into sensors, noise reduction -- in many different modes -- will become an important battleground in which image sensor and SoC vendors will have to compete. Glad to see it getting some attention :-)