Canon has announced that it has created a new 410-megapixel 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor“the highest number of pixels ever achieved” in a sensor of its size.
Due to the level of detail the new sensor can capture, Canon expects it to be used by “surveillance, medical and industrial”, where there is a demand for “extreme resolution”. With 410 megapixels, Canon’s sensor has a resolution of 24K, 198 times higher than HD and 12 times higher than 8K. This makes it easy to crop and then enlarge a photo captured by the sensor without losing detail.
Typically, the extremely high megapixel count is limited to cameras with medium format sensors. But the beauty of Canon cramming so many pixels into a 35mm format is that it should be able to be used “in combination with lenses for full-frame sensors.”
Canon had to make a lot of design changes to make this happen. The new sensor features a redesigned circuit model and a “back-illuminated stacked formation” where “the pixel segment and the signal processing segment are interspersed.” This translates to a playback speed of 3,280 megapixels per second and eight frames per second video. A monochrome version of the sensor can group four pixels at a time to take even brighter images and capture “100-megapixel video at 24 frames per second,” Canon says.
It doesn’t look like this type of sensor is about to become a mainstream camera any time soon, but the fact that this level of miniaturization is possible means that it might one day, for photography junkies who wish it.
