A physicist, Dillon joined Kodak Research Labs in 1959, where he worked for his entire career. In 1974, Kodak started work on what would become the camcorder. James U. Lemke got the job of developing the video recording mechanism; Dillon was assigned to create the image sensor.
The charge-coupled device (CCD) had already been invented by George E. Smith and Willard Boyle of Bell Labs, but it was monochrome; consumers, and thus Kodak, wanted color. The problem: at the time, producing color required a prism to separate the light onto three sensors, one each for red, green, and blue, plus circuitry to combine the resulting signals into one stream, all of which would add size, weight, and cost. Dillon came up with the solution: a pattern of color filters over the pixels of a single sensor. This “color filter array” could produce color with just one CCD.
Dillon consulted another Kodak researcher, Bryce Bayer, as to the best pattern to use. Bayer invented what’s now known as the “Bayer filter” — but that design was incompatible with the American NTSC scanning pattern, so Dillon came up with his own filter array that was. Kodak’s Albert Brault came up with a process to apply Dillon’s filter onto CCDs during wafer fabrication (an early stage of chip manufacturing) so that the resulting chips were incredibly cheap, as well as reasonably compact.
Since then, further refinements have resulted in smaller and smaller chips with higher and higher resolution — yet more and more cheaply, so that today, high-resolution color cameras are cheap enough to put in every phone, drone, dashcam, police bodycam, and even in doorbell buttons. Dillon came up with another refinement shortly after inventing the color CCD: a way to make them sensitive to infrared light to make “night vision” CCDs. In 2019 Dillon and Brault received Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards for “Pioneering Development of the Single-Chip Color Camera”. In 2022, they received the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for “Contributions to the development of image sensors with integrated color filter arrays for digital video and still cameras”. Peter Lewis Presnall Dillon died April 30, at 92.