The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says there’s a novel answer: put them both in the same sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new lineup of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer so-called “native color lidar.” These sensors are capable of capturing color imagery and three-dimensional depth information at the same time, acting as two sensors in one.

Oster CEO Angus Pekala said his company has been in development for a decade, and he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product lineup in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it “the holy grail of what a roboticist would ever want.”

“For all of human history, it’s been this: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to figure out the combination with some high-level reasoning, and waste a lot of time doing it,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies only get halfway there in terms of calibrating and fusing data streams.”

Oster’s new sensors, he said, change that equation.

“The goal is to stop the cameras. There’s no reason why one sensor can’t do both,” he said.

The Rev8 lineup arrives at a dynamic moment for lidar companies. A years-long wave of consolidation has been underway, with Oster buying Velodyne and Luminar’s assets recently being acquired in bankruptcy.

At the same time, the sensor market is exploding. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robotics and are scaling quickly. Robotics companies — humanoid and industrial — are raising investment dollars and need sensors to make sense of the world. There’s so much interest in this space that new companies like Boston-based Terader are popping up and testing the waters with entirely new methods. (In Teradar’s case, it’s using terahertz imaging.)

A color leader that combines depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable for robotics players, Pacala said. And he said Oster worked with Fiji Film and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to make a great camera.”

In fact, Pacala claims that Ouster’s color leader “improves on modern cameras in many ways” based on the way the company already designs and builds its sensors.

Oster uses a so-called “Digital Leader” architecture. Instead of the analog approach, which involves many moving parts, Oster captures the laser information directly on its custom chip known as a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detector.

The company is using the same SPAD technology to capture color image data in the Rev8 sensor. Pacala said this new technique allows his image capture to be more sensitive than a normal camera.

“It’s 48-bit color, 116 dB of dynamic range, like megapixel resolution. Those are top-line numbers that make it pound for pound for a good camera. But it also happens to be coming as a 3D colorized point cloud as a pre-fused data stream,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream, but that’s one of the strengths of this system, is you can just use the lidar data stream, you can just use the camera data stream, or you can use the pre-fused data stream, depending on how forward-thinking your perception team is.”

Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and is now taking orders. He said he was particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he said he considered “the best long-range leader in the industry.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is “by a large margin” smaller than other long-range leaders.

“We have a long-range LiDAR, but it’s clearly not above everything else,” he said. “It’s a big leap forward for Ouster. I think that means we’re going to start seeing it a lot more on high-speed robotrucking, robotaxis applications, I think a lot of drone stuff will move to OS1 Max.”

Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include the OS0, OS1, and OSDome, according to a press release.

Oster isn’t the only company that has started talking about Color Leader. Last month, the Chinese company Hesai announced it. Own color lidar platform It says it will enter mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, such as Innoviz, have done their own take on the “color leader” before.

Most other players trying to “fuse” cameras and lidar sensors are essentially packing them into a box, Pacala says. The approach Ouster (and, to be fair, Hesai) is taking is putting lidar and imaging tech on a single chip.

This dramatically reduces the work Ouster customers have to do to make sense of competing sensor streams, Pacala said, and it also prepares those customers to eventually ditch the cameras altogether — all while being cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.

“It’s fundamentally changing the kind of value proposition we’re selling to a customer beyond that stage,” he told TechCrunch.