Performance characteristics needed for protein crystal diffraction x-ray detectors.

During the 1990's, macromolecular crystallography became progressively more dependent on synchrotrons X-ray sources for diffraction data collection. Detectors of this diffraction data at synchrotrons beamlines have evolved over the decade, from film to image phosphor plates, and then to CCD systems. These changes have been driven by the data quality and quantity improvements each newer detector technology provided. The improvements have been significant. It is likely that newer detector technologies will be adopted at synchrotron beamlines for crystallographic diffraction data collection in the future, but these technologies will have to compete with existing CCD detector systems which are already excellent and are getting incrementally better in terms of size, speed, efficiency, and resolving power. Detector development for this application at synchrotrons must concentrate on making systems which are bigger and faster than CCDs and which can capture weak data more efficiently. And there is a need for excellent detectors which are less expensive than CCD systems