Patent ID: 7718945

Claim:
A solid-state imaging device, comprising: a photodetecting section in which M×N of pixels are two-dimensionally arranged in M rows and N columns, each of the pixels includes a photodiode respectively, and a pixel P m,n existing at an m-th row and an n-th column includes a photodiode PD 1 m,n ; a row selecting section that selects one or more rows, out of M rows of the photodetecting section, instructs each pixel in the selected rows to accumulate an electric charge generated in the photodiode PD 1 m,n in response to the incidence of light, and instructs to output data corresponding to an amount of accumulated electric charge of each pixel by each row of the photodetecting section; and a first signal processing section that inputs data of each pixel, outputted by each row of the photodetecting section by an instruction from the row selecting section, and outputs the data by each pixel, wherein each electric-charge accumulating time of each row of the photodetecting section is changed, where M and N each represent an integer of 2 or more, m represents any integer equal to or greater than 1 but equal to or smaller than M, and n represents any integer equal to or greater than 1 but equal to or smaller than N.