These two guys at Rochester figured out a couple of advances that may let digital cameras run for years on a single charge. The innovations depend on a) reducing the number of transistors to allow more light to pass through, and b) arranging hardware elements to assist in what is traditionally a software task: image compression. The result is cameras that take way less image to capture a photo.

The trick with aligning the pixels to cosine peaks (resulting in a non-uniform sensor array) is brilliant.

www.dpreview.com/news/0512..._chips.asp