Customer Reviews

The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete (Enterprise)

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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.

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.

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.

Even after hearing about the uneven writing, I was surprised by how meandering and unfocused this book is. It's a mishmash of confused metaphors, irrelevant details, and unclear points. I can't tell whether it's meant to be instructive, or merely illustrative. If you're already familiar with the technologies described, you'll be bored. If you aren't, you'll be baffled. None of the men discussed in the book are portrayed as being particularly interesting, aside from the obvious, though unexplored details of their various technical abilities. I was excited by the subject matter, but put off by the plodding and pedantic prose. It feels like Gilder wrote this while half asleep.

I was very disappointed in this book. Gilder writes in a very obtuse way and it is hard to connect the dots with him. Save you money.