Canon announced that it has created a new one 410 megapixel 35mm full frame CMOS sensor“the largest number of pixels ever achieved” in a sensor of this size.
Because of the level of detail the new sensor can capture, Canon expects it to be used in “surveillance, medical and industrial” where there is a demand for “extreme resolution.” At 410 megapixels, the Canon 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 taken by the sensor without losing any detail.
Typically sky-high megapixel counts are limited to Cameras with medium format sensors. But the beauty of Canon packing so many pixels into 35mm is that it can be used “in combination with lenses designed for full-frame sensors.”
To achieve this, Canon had to make more than a few design changes. The new sensor features a redesigned circuit pattern and a “backlit stacking formation” where “the pixel segment and the signal processing segment are layered on top of each other.” This corresponds to a readout speed of 3,280 megapixels per second and a video speed of eight frames per second. A monochrome version of the sensor can combine four pixels at once to capture even brighter images and record “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 it could one day, for the shutterbugs who want it .
