Chris,

You might be pleasantly surprised what an 8051 can do with an image sensor. I once clocked a KODAK tri-color, 4000 pixel, single line CCD sensor into an IDT Dual Port Ram Array (1 DP per color).

Counters would just continously assemble a byte from the serial bit stream, write into memory, and inc (modulo) to the next location in the DP building up a 4k x 2K image while the 8051 would just access and frame against the data as it pleased.

Most of the time i didn't need the high resolution and so would "skip" pixels in collecting my frame.

regards,
p