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:Amazing but (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the fundamental rule of how cameras function. Without such a limitation, you'd need incremental exposure timing/capture which I don't believe any sensor's can perform, then you need to actually process the HDR'ness of the image, which is quite frankly very subjective. One may choose to blind the viewer with the light shining through the window, or one may want to see the house across the street. This is an artisitic quality that needs to be supported regardless of which technology you choose. In the down to earth point of view, you may look into bracketing, which can at least support HDR from most decent SLR's, but of course even those techniques require two shots, meaning basically absoltely still shots. The real HDR shots are taken with prism splitters into two bodies, but that means two identical cameras with a custom expensive setup... Well, nobody said the perfection was cheap.
Re:That "full moon" "after" shot... yeah... no. (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever taken a shoot with a 50mm f:1.5 on one of today's pro cameras? If you multiple the light available by 56 times (increasing the pixle size by 7.5) you are looking at a shit load of light.
I can shoot nice outdoor night pics under a full moon with just an F5 @ 5 seconds, drop that down to a F1.5 and that's more than 8 times the light, add this new sensor and that's 280 times more light! or about 6 FPS and note this is on a canon 5D MK I that's almost 7 and 1.2 years old..
Add in the current 3 and half year old generations improvement on the ISO and that goes from the 1600 I shoot at, to 6400, or 4 times the light and you get 24 FPS..
So thats with jsut the sensor.. If they where using F1.2 or even F1 lens and one would expect when showing such a beast and 30 FPS seems like no issue at all..
Re:Amazing but (Score:5, Interesting)
If dynamic range is important to you, you may be interested in Rambus' new technology:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2013/02/27/rambus-shows-binaryt-pixel-sensor-technology-for-expanded-dynamic-range [dpreview.com]
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:4, Interesting)
Could not doing 3x3 binning on the existing 18MP sensor (if the controller supported it) produce similar results?
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:4, Interesting)
19-micron pixels seem big if you're comparing them to DSLRs, where everything has to fit into a nice little portable package. But it's not at all an unusual size in science-grade detectors used for astronomical instrumentation. At work [naoj.org] our instruments [naoj.org] use detectors with pixel sizes ranging from 13.5 to 50 microns.
I might be a little more impressed that they're doing this at video frame-rates, and without cryogenics...