Patent ID: 7476835

Claim:
A driving method for a solid-state imaging device, the solid-state imaging device comprising: a plurality of photoelectric conversion elements formed on a semiconductor substrate; a plurality of vertical charge transfer parts that transfer electric charges generated in said plurality of photoelectric conversion elements in the vertical direction; a line memory that temporarily stores the electric charges transferred from said plurality of vertical charge transfer parts; and a horizontal charge transfer part that transfers the electric charges stored in the line memory in the horizontal direction perpendicular to the vertical direction, the driving method comprising: an electric charge transferring step of transferring all of the electric charges, which are stored in the line memory in an array, to the horizontal charge transfer part; an adding step of transferring only an electric charge, which is positioned at an upstream side of the horizontal charge transfer part in the charge transfer direction, of two adjacent electric charges having the same color components among the electric charges transferred to the horizontal charge transfer part in the horizontal direction and adding the two electric charges; and a horizontal transfer step of transferring the added electric charges in the horizontal direction, wherein the solid-state imaging device has a characteristic of each of said plurality of photoelectric conversion elements such that for a selected electric charge, the array of the electric charges transferred from said plurality of vertical charge transfer parts and stored in the line memory is an array in which one of the two electric charges adjacent to the selected electric charge has the same color component as the selected electric charge and the other electric charge of the two adjacent electric charges has a different color component from the selected electric charge.