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Canon Unveils 120-Megapixel Camera Sensor
Barence writes "Canon claims to have developed a digital camera sensor with a staggering 120-megapixel resolution. The APS-H sensor — which is the same type that is used in Canon's professional EOS-1D cameras — boasts a ridiculous resolution of 13,280 x 9,184 pixels. The CMOS sensor is so densely packed with pixels that it can capture full HD video on just one-sixtieth of the total surface area. However, don't hold your breath waiting for this baby to arrive in a camera. Canon unveiled a 50-megapixel sensor in 2007, but that's not made it any further than the labs to date."
It's probably not going too far out on a limb to say that the any-day-now rumored announcement of an update to the 1D won't include this chip, but such insane resolution opens up a lot of amazing possibilities, from cropping to cheap telephoto to medium and large format substitution. Maybe I should stop fantasizing about owning a full-frame 1D or 5D and redirect my lust towards 120 megapixels.
I'm just curious what this would be like in low light settings, cramming that many pixels into such a small space has got to have some effect on sensitivity.
Canon had better come up with some sharper lenses with a sensor like this. I shoot shoot with APS-H sensors on the Canon 1D and many of the lenses that Canon, Nikon and Sigma among others make are not nearly sharp enough to deal with many more pixels than are on say... the Canon 1Ds. Zeiss makes some sharp glass, but with the pixel density Canon is talking about with this new sensor, I'd worry about noise in low light conditions like those on my last embed on the USS Toledo (world's first embed in a strategic nuclear submarine). Any sort of low light, high ISO images will be truly challenging environments for such small pixel imaging sites.
It might be a great technology demonstrator or even a specific use CMOS chip for longer exposures, but I doubt it will have any applications in consumer or professional cameras unless some additional technology (or physics) comes into play.
Also, one would have to come up with some new strategies for moving all of that data around. As it is, on the latest Canon 1D Mk IV, they are pushing 16.1 MP around at about 10 fps. With this new sensor, just the readout would prevent this sensor from being used in any but the most specialized of applications.
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45 MP photo to zoom into:
Dubai
Good film under ideal conditions can handle 2500 line pairs per inch. The mathematical purist who was more obsessed with numbers than practical applications would want a sensor that can handle 10,000 dots per inch for copying film, and an image sensor of 5,000 dots per inch for shooting, with optics, electronics, and other hardware (and software!) to match.
5,000 dpi on a standard 35mm 3:2 aspect ratio means 37.5 megapixels.
For what it's worth, 10,000 dpi would be 4x that amount, or 150 megapixels.
I have to go with Ken Rockwell on this one: Megapixels don't matter. Unless you're blowing your 35mm shots up to poster size, pixel density over about 8 megapixels is useless overkill.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I'm sure the professionals would love such a critter, but as a person who likes to just take personal stills, to me the megapixel war is over. At this point in time I have a hard time getting excited over anything more than 10-12MP. They print just fine to photo sizes that I'd be interested in, and the truth is that MOST of my photos I keep digitally anyways where anything that has more pixels than my monitor is a waste (particularly with the ballooning size of these photos).
I'm far more interested in seeing higher quality photos within our current megapixel options than seeing that particular number go up and up - afterall, there's a HUGE difference between your typical DSLR at 10MP and a $100 point and shoot at 10MP. That metric doesn't define the quality of the image.
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You spell it Cannon and you're telling someone who shoots with a 1D and has likely used Zeiss lenses that they can't buy awesome Canon lenses in the toy department at Best Buy.
I'd love to be able to take many of my old family and vacation photos and take a small piece and blow it up to 4x6 or even 8x12 size without noticeable-to-the-casual-observer loss of detail.
Imagine taking crowd-scene photos of a sporting event then when your friend said he was there and points his face out in the crowd, you can print him out an 8x12 of him and his friends.
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Been there, done that, believe it was patented by iPIX. Not sure who holds it now since they're gone AFAIK...
Seriously, they used this to do those 3D virtual tours.
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A more substantial problem is that diffraction limits the effective resolution of an optical system to well above the size of each of these pixels. This is a problem with current sensors at narrow apertures; lenses exhibit a measurable loss of sharpness, typically f/11 and up, because the airy disks expand as the aperture contracts. With hugely dense sensors like this, though... plugging some numbers into a website that explains the whole situation suggests that you'd need to shoot with apertures than f/1.8 to get circles of confusion smaller than the size of a single pixel.
That's right--even "fast" f/2.8 lenses are limited by physics to never being able to project detail onto individual pixels. You could potentially add a deconvolution stage in software to recover additional sharpness, but not in hardware.
Another thing. Do the math: the pixels are 2.1 micrometers square. Compare to trichromatic human vision, which detects red light peaking at 564 nanometers, 0.564 micrometers. The size of a pixel is within a factor of four of the wavelengths they measure. Staggering.
Glass isn't the problem. We need new laws of nature, since we're near the edges of the ones we have now.
From a professional photographer's standpoint, I DO appreciate more resolution, because I do make things that end up on posters and billboards. Also, the primary advantage in most cases is the ability to crop and still have a decent resolution image.
As another poster mentioned, the main problem at this point is with the glass. Sharp glass that remains the same size to accommodate a denser, not larger sensor is a tough proposition, and the new frontier of technology. Things like liquid lenses may overcome this in the future, who knows.
Right now, with my 21MP 5D Mk. II, I can use modern Canon "L" zoom lenses too my heart's content and have an image that is sharp from corner to corner, especially now that you can easily correct for chromatic aberration in RAW processing software. (to give you an idea of how far this has come, when I was doing 3D animation 10 years ago, we would commonly add back in chromatic aberration to 3D generated images to give them a sense of realism.)
For the sort of resolution discussed here, if you wanted relatively sharp pixels at 1:1 (spatial, or perceived resolution, actual sharpness delineation from one pixel to the next) you would probably want to stick with prime (non-zoom) lenses with fewer glass elements, and it would probably OK.
Other posters are correct in that this kind of resolution is currently unnecessary for consumer and casual use. But for me, large blow ups and two-page spreads are a frequent thing, and I apprecicate all the pixels I've got. :)
boasts a ridiculous resolution of 13,280 x 9,184 pixels
My 6x7 cm film images are already 11,023 x 9,448 when scanned at 4000 dpi.
And there are no artifacts from Bayer interpolation.
30x36" prints, and even larger, are spectacular. But you need good lenses, a good tripod, and good technique; otherwise you won't resolve the detail.
And with 20x30" prints only $9 at Costco (on profiled printers), I *am* enlarging my prints to poster size, thankyouverymuch.
I look forward to digital catching up.
I'm sure it'll be perfect for this application:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenoptic_camera (a type of camera that can let you re-focus (and to a certain extent re-position) images after taking the shot. The problem is that it requires a LOT of resolution to produce acceptable images).
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H7yx31yslM&NR=1 (demo video from paper above)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3cyntPC2NU
Here's one built with a 250 MP Flatbet scanner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O5fPoacF3Q&feature=related
Instead of total pixel count, get one set of pixels to shoot at the equivalent of 100 speed, and the adjacent set of pixels to shoot at 200 speed etc etc. Then process the pixels to get details in dark regions and to scale the brightness. I would like a dynamic range (brightness ratio of the brightest to dimmest pixel) to be a million or more, not the present 1000. Human eye has a dynamic range of about 1 million (only in the fovea, not in the peripheral vision).
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you have the technology to make a 120 megapixel camera, reverse your thinking. Can you use that technology to decrease the size of your current product, so that a standard 8 to 10 megapixel camera is so small and compact, that it meets the needs of the growing phone/ipod/iphone/ipad industry?
Yes as I said below, averaging a lot of pixels would lower the noise floor and increase the range. However it increases the range by far, far less than if you used those N pixels for N different-exposed shots and this sort of huge range increase is normally what is meant by "HDR".
I think this merits explanation in a bit more length.
Nearly all digital cameras have Bayer array sensors, where each photosite only records the value for one of the three RGB color channels. A 12MP Bayer array camera produces full-color images with 12 million RGB pixels, but that overstates the amount of information that the sensor captures by 3x; for each pixel in the resulting image, only one of the three channel's value was actually directly recorded from the scene, and the other two channels' values were interpolated from the values of adjacent pixels that recorded the missing channels.
Or, the quick way to put it, a 12 megapixels Bayer array camera is really 6 green megapixels, 3 red and 3 blue. This has several consequences:
These two things mean that you can get resolution improvements from putting more photosites on a Bayer sensor, even if the size of the individual pixels is smaller than the circle of confusion of the lens.
Imagine if the length of the side of the photosite coincided exactly with the diameter of circle of confusion. This means that a point on the subject that aligns perfectly with the center of a photosite is going to project entirely inside that photosite. Now assume that point of light is pure red. If the photosite is a red-sensitive one, the sensor then records the fact that the point has a strong red component, but it can't tell if it has a green or blue component. If the photosite is green-sensitive, then the sensor records the fact that the point has no green component, but it can't tell whether it has a red or blue component.
Now, however, imagine that the photosite is smaller than the circle of confusion. Then some of the light is spilling over to adjacent photosites--which means that you record a value for all three color channels for that point on the subject. This makes it easier to infer the values of the missing channels at the pixel that corresponds to that photosite, because the adjacent photosites will have recorded it.
So, making the pixels smaller beyond the lens' diffraction limit lets you (a) use a weaker anti-alias filter on the sensor (or none at all); (b) gives you more consistent resolution for subjects of different colors. If you go all the way, you'd make your sensor have 4x the amount of photosites as the number of pixels in the output images: e.g., you'd build a camera with a 60MP Bayer-array sensor but output 15MP images, using 4 photosites per output pixel (and no antialias filter). That would outperform today's 15MP cameras.
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