Canon Japan has just unveiled a new ultra-high-resolution image sensor for the industrial and surveillance market. The APS-H format sensor breaks new ground with a resolution of 250-megapixels… that’s 125x the resolution of Full HD, and 30x the resolution of 4K!
This isn’t the first time Canon has released an ultra-high resolution image sensor. The company showed off a 120MP APS-H chip in 2018, and regularly releases “high sensitivity” CMOS sensors that can pretty much see in the dark.
Today’s announcement is an evolution of the former: a 250MP APS-H format CMOS image sensor that can read the full sensor at 5 frames per second, or use a technology called “Region of Interest” to capture any 8K piece of your field of view at 24 frames per second. If you want to capture the full field of view a little faster, there’s line-skipping technology built in as well, allowing you to shoot up to 45 frames per second by “thinning out” your output in the vertical direction to 1/9th.
Check out the demo below to learn more and see these options in action:
As you may have already guessed, Canon isn’t planning to slap this inside a consumer-level DSLR or mirrorless camera any time soon. The press release specifically calls out industrial use, digital archiving, wide area surveillance, and microscopy, and while Canon does mention “video production” at one point, we probably won’t see this particular sensor in any EOS R or Cinema EOS cameras.
Still, while these sensors are rarely intended for consumer use, they show off what Canon’s image sensor division is working on and give both photo and video shooters hope that some of this tech will trickle down into the consumer market eventually. The ability to pack more pixels on a sensor certainly will come in handy when Canon releases the rumored 90MP EOS R5s.
To learn more about this ultra-high-resolution image sensor, watch the demo video above or head over to the Canon Japan website. And if you want to see even more up-and-coming sensor technology from Canon, check out our feature on the company’s latest “high sensitivity” image sensor that can shoot Full HD video in near-darkness.
(via Canon Rumors)
Author: DL Cade
Source: Petapixel
