Canon Shows the Most Sensitive Camera Sensor In the World 218
An anonymous reader writes "Canon announced today that it successfully developed a super high-sensitivity full-frame CMOS sensor developed exclusively for video recording. The new Full HD sensor can capture light no other comparable sensor can see and it uses pixels 7.5 larger than the best commercial professional cameras in existence today."
There doesn't seem to be a gallery of images, but the video demo (direct link to an mpeg4) makes it seem pretty sensitive.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Insightful)
That need not even be the case. You could still do it in 35mm, 1080p HD video is roughy 2.1 megapixels, where as the EOS1DX is 18.1mp.
So there is definitely enough room to make pixels 7 times larger than a EOS1DX
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this means that sensor is physically larger
The sensor isn't physically larger. The specs say it's a full-frame 35mm sensor, and the photo of the prototype camera shows it with a standard EF lens mounted: a larger sensor would need medium or large format lenses, and it would be pretty much dead on arrival in the market if you had to go out and start buying medium or (God forbid) large format lenses to feed the thing. Half of the allure of Canon for video, after all, is that you can reuse your still EF lenses, and demanding huge format glass for HD video would be absurd.
The reason the photo sites are so much bigger in this sensor, presumably, is because the resolution is much lower than Canon's still SLR cameras. It doesn't give the resolution, but since it was only described as capturing "HD video," I wouldn't be surprised to find that the sensor's native resolution is that of 1080p video: 1920x1080 pixels, or about 2 megapixels. The 1Dx, on the other hand, has a native resolution of 18 megapixels.
So far, Canon (and more recently Nikon), have been allowing users to record HD video on their SLR cameras by scaling their massive native resolutions way down to a size that you can reasonably encode and cram onto a memory card in an SLR form factor. This approach, on the other hand, seems to be to build a sensor with a lower native resolution suitable for HD video at the same size as the larger SLR sensors, so you don't have to do any down-scaling and you get massive photo sites, which gives you a huge advantage in sensitivity.
Re:Freaking Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the credits of Barry Lyndon include a special thanks to Zeiss for the lenses.
Just goes to show, it's all in the glass - you can have as many megapixels as you want in the sensor, but if your lens isn't up to it, you're throwing away the potential of all those pixels.
Re:That "full moon" "after" shot... yeah... no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially with the sky being blue from the full moon alone.
is the same as the AC who then posted this one:
I obviously didn't object to it being that hue, dumbass. I objected to it being *that* bright. It was a day shot. And obviously so.
then I'd say that's exactly what you did say.
And as for your assumption that I'm an American ... well, you haven't got a clue, mate. You're many thousands of kilometres off. There are other countries in the world where English is the native language, after all. "We have 2013" indeed.
Sometimes I really do wonder whether /. is worth the trouble.
Re:Freaking Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
And you can have the best glass in the world, but if your sensor is from say a kodak dcs 620, that is just a complete waste. The whole system has to be suited, one weak link kills quality.