Canon recently announced a new development – a 410-megapixel 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor. It achieves the highest number of pixels on a sensor of its size to date.
The sensor likely won’t be used for commercial purposes any time soon. However, it could be the starting point for new possibilities and higher picture quality for smaller devices in years to come.
Canon goes ultra-compact
The new sensor is so detailed that Canon expects it to be used mostly by “surveillance, medicine, and industry.” You know, the folks that can actually use such an extreme resolution. 410MP translates to a 24K (24,592 x 16,704px) resolution, which is twelve times sharper than 8k and 198 times sharper than HD. That makes cropping without losing detail a breeze.
Typically, super high resolutions are limited to cameras with medium-format sensors, but Canon’s feat of packing all this detail into 35mm means that it can be used “in combination with lenses for full-frame sensors.”
In order to achieve this, the sensor uses a “back-illuminated stacked formation” that houses the interlayered pixel segment and signal processing segments. Canon also needed to redesign the sensor’s circuitry pattern. Put another way, it’s really fancy.
All the hard work results in a readout speed (which determines frame rate) of 3,290 megapixels per second, and video footage at eight frames per second. Lastly, a monochrome version of this sensor features a “four-pixel binning” function that joins four pixels together for improved sensitivity to shoot even brighter images and footage, including up to 100MP video footage at 24 frames per second.
The sensor may not be quite ready for consumer cameras just yet, but the fact that so many pixels are available in this size means it could one day lead to new possibilities for camera quality in compact devices.
