Canon Announces New 120 megapixel CMOS APH Sensor

[Michael Pancier]

Now what will they do with it?

Read about it here.
http://www.canon.com/news/2010/aug24e.html

[Roman Kurywczak]

Oh......I hope it's not a rumor!!! That would be incredible!!!!

[RichardLaBella]

Yeah, and notice that ISO performance wasn't mentioned. Probably have to run at ISO 50 to get anything acceptable.

And terabite hard disks will really be in demand - I guess Seagate & Western Digital will be happy with that. Imagine what Photoshop will do to a 120mb raw when converting to .tif or .psd!

[James Shadle]

It's real!
Canon also developed a 50 megapixel sensor in 2007.
Can you say noise?

[Joel Eade]

A 1Ds MK V..........retail $19,995.00 !!!

[Emil Martinec]

It's real!
Canon also developed a 50 megapixel sensor in 2007.
Can you say noise?

120MP is basically P&S sized pixels (2.2µ) in a DSLR sized sensor. Please note that noise is not a fixed quantity, but varies with scale in the image. There are two components to noise in most images -- read noise (noise contributed by the camera electronics), and photon shot noise (quantum fluctuations in the light signal itself). At low to moderate ISO, photon noise tends to be the more visible noise in an image. At a fixed image scale, this noise depends only on how much light is collected, and is therefore independent of pixel size. High ISO might be compromised a bit; with read noise unchanged from current performance of production DSLR's, read noise at a fixed scale will be about twice that of 7D (since the pixels are about half the linear dimension). Low ISO might not be so compromised; for instance the 40D has less read noise than the 1D3 at base ISO, so smaller pixels might have slight advantage unless Canon decides that cleaner low ISO shadows are more of a priority (they've been going backwards in this department recently).

And since diffraction is often discussed in the context of pixel size, note that diffraction is a property of the optics, not the sensor; having smaller pixels does not increase diffraction -- on the contrary, all it does is decrease the range of f-stops over which the sensor resolution is the limiting factor in system resolution, rather than the rest of the optics. A side benefit is that the AA filter's blur radius, being tied to the pixel size, will be smaller; and demosaic artifacts will be pushed off to finer image scales where they will be less noticeable.

What Canon really needs to do if they are serious about heading in this direction is to concentrate some development resources on compression technology -- sRAW is the lamest possible image compression method one can imagine. Much better would be the sort of compression RED uses -- preserves nearly full resolution while reducing file sizes substantially, and allowing continuous shooting without maxing out the image buffer.