Canon has announced that it has created a new 410-megapixel, 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor, the “highest pixel count ever” for a sensor of its size.
Because of the level of detail the new sensor can capture, Canon expects it to be used in “surveillance, medicine and industry,” where there is a need for “extreme resolution.” At 410 megapixels, the Canon sensor has a resolution of 24K, 198 times greater than HD, and 12 times greater than 8K. That makes it easy to crop and enlarge the image captured by the sensor without losing detail.
In general, sky high megapixel counts are limited to cameras with medium format sensors. But the beauty of Canon squeezing this many pixels into 35mm is that it should be able to be used “in combination with full-frame sensor lenses.”
Canon had to make more than a few design changes to make this happen. The new sensor has a redesigned circuit pattern and a “stacked back-illuminated structure” where “the pixel segment and the signal processing segment are interconnected.” That translates to a reading speed of 3,280 megapixels per second, and video at eight frames per second. The monochrome version of the sensor can combine four pixels at once to shoot bright photos and capture “100-megapixel video at 24 frames per second,” Canon says.
It doesn’t sound like this type of sensor will make it into a consumer camera anytime soon, but the fact that this level of miniaturization is possible means that it could one day, for photographers who want it.
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