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Canon Develops 8 X 8 Inch Digital CMOS Sensor
dh003i writes "Canon has developed a 8 x 8 inch CMOS digital sensor. It will be able to capture an image with 1/100th the light intensity required by a DSLR and will be able to record video at 60 fps in lighting half the intensity of moonlight. There are already many excellent quality lenses designed to cover 8 x 10 inches, although Canon may develop some of their own designed specifically for their requirements."
The article did not explain if this would be incorporated into a camera anytime soon. Also I wonder how it compares to the Hasselblad digital backs and cameras. http://www.hasselbladusa.com/
I assume this means a would-be digital Ansel Adams will need to drag around a camera the size of a bread machine? I'm not too confident the market size is large enough for anything other than highly specialized scientific equipment. I don't see large format digital cameras even for professional photographers because of what it will probably cost to produce.
There is currently no information about the sensor's resolution.
Darn, that was my biggest question. Low light photography has always been one of my interests, so I would have a lot of fun with a camera based on this technology :D ... Actually, I'd be rather keen to have a try making my own... Maybe that's for another day though. ;)
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Moonlight on the earth surface or moonlight of the moon?
Taking photos of the moon is same thing as taking photos of the bright sunlight of theearth surface. Like 1/125 f:11 ISO 100.
No but really, that is impressive but depends from the aperture and lens quality do we get better than f:0.4 or something. But that just means the A/D conversion is impressive at that size of sensor so we might see very noiseless ISO of 250 000 setting.
But there really is demand to get a old formats back. Especially if the megapixel amount would be same as with negative. What is not going to happend because Canon likes more to make bigger sensors than tight megapixels. Thing about A4 (197x210mm) sized full size architecture camera. On such negative with ISO 50-100 you can capture more details than what you could even think about with digital cameras.
it's be great if it were something lame like 6 megapixel
.8 mp and it takes amazing pictures because the sensor is huge. Like this thing.
Why is 6 mp lame? Do you know the Hubble is something like
Actually, they use software to merge the photos. Otherwise the photos would suck.
RTFA: This follows last week's development announcement of Canon's 120 megapixel 29.2 x 20.2mm APS-H CMOS sensor. They are different sensors.
Perfect for capturing the Sorority girls in the next dorm over that turn-off the lights, but never close the curtains. "No honey I can't see you, but my camera can."
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"It will be able to capture an image with 1/100th the light intensity required by a DSLR"
I'm reading that as ultra fast shutter speeds being available for fast moving photography. Cool.
TFA doesn't say how many pixels it is.
One?
Ahem. Remember that you have to account for the Bayseian Filter in front of the sensor.
It's not a "Bayseian filter" [sic], it's a Bayer matrix.
That's not the whole story. The actual size of the HST sensor is something like 45mm square (or maybe diagonally). Hubble takes amazing pictures for a few reasons. 1. It's got an 8 foot (2.4m) collecting mirror, so its light gathering prowess is amazing compared to normal cameras - like most telescopes. This means that the sensor is only effective because Hubble can direct so much light onto it. 2. It tracks the sky - like motorised ground based telescopes it is incredibly good at pointing in the same place for extended periods of time. So it can take longer exposures to get more light in. The Deep Field was taken with exposure times of roughly 1200 seconds, for instance. I assume it could expose for longer if it was at a Lagrange point and didn't have to contend with orbiting the Earth. 3. It's in space.. so there is very little in the way of light pollution (besides the sun!) and no atmospheric diffraction limit. Presumably they also make "panoramas" of the images to make them appear larger in print. The famous "Pillars of Heaven" shot is certainly not one image.
And how is a higher resolution sensor going to undo lens aberrations? That would be nice.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
You have this exactly backwards. The more you can stop down your lens, f2.8 wide open and f60 stopped down, means less light to your sensor, the greater your depth of field. This sensor means you could shoot at ISO 25, a shutter speed of 1/500 or 1/1000 of a second, and an fstop of 60 very easily in a lot less than full light conditions. That's a great depth of field, a shutter speed fast enough to reduce the effects of any vibration, and still get enough light to get a good exposure. I'm just guessing on what the fstop and shutter speeds would be with a sensor that light sensitive, but with a modern dslr you couldn't even get close to those settings in anything less than bright sunlight without very low shutter speeds that require the use of a tripod and higher ISO settings that tend to induce noise.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
That's not true. Canon's professional cameras have larger sensors combined with higher pixel counts, however, once you hit a certain point where you're out resolving the lens, you're not going to get a whole lot out of adding more pixels without enlarging the area by more than that. Which is why the full frame 35mm format will always be capable of having more pixels than the APC-S or 4/3 formats will, at some point you hit the point of out resolving the lens at which point you're only option is to go larger. No technical wizardry in chip or in the camera hardware will ever make up for that.
Same goes for lens aberrations of various sorts, you can make them less obvious, but at the end of the day, you're still sacrificing image quality and counting on the camera system to do the right thing. But you're still going to lose detail and introduce other image problems.
You have to take into account noise on fingernail sized sensors. On this scale at 6MP, the noise floor would be very low.
Pixel count isn't everything, especially these days.
That's why a 6 megapixel APS-C DSLR will blow away most 10-14 megapixel point and shoots in terms of image quality.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If they use this for scientific work (which I imagine they might), something tells me they won't have any Bayer matrix on it, and will instead do multiple shoots with different whole-image filters, to avoid artifacts due to demosaicing.
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