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Canon Shows the Most Sensitive Camera Sensor In the World
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.
Err, of course the sky is blue under moonlight: it's just reflected sunlight, after all (but see below).
The problem is that the Moon is much fainter than the Sun and thus the overall light level is low. So low that it doesn't significantly activate the colour-sensitive cones in the human eye, meaning that you only really see with the rods in black-and-white.
But take a long exposure with a camera (or a video frame rate with this Canon sensor), and the blue will most definitely come through.
(Actually, the moonlight-illuminated sky is slightly bluer than a sunlight-illuminated one, as the Moon's slightly brown-ish colour first imprints its spectral dependence on the sunlight which bounces off it. That light is then Rayleigh-scattered off the molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, imprinting the well-known 1/lambda^4 dependence which makes the sky blue).
The newly developed CMOS sensor features pixels measuring 19 microns square in size, which is more than 7.5-times the surface area of the pixels on the CMOS sensor incorporated in Canon's top-of-the-line EOS-1D X and other digital SLR cameras.
I guess this is to collect more photons in low light conditions. Of course this means that sensor is physically larger, but that's not a problem for Canon, they have made medium format cameras in the past.
They use another trick to take care of this, though: "microlenses", miniature optics in front of each pixel that channel light away from the insensitive regions (the data paths) and onto the actual light-sensitive pixels. A recent advance is "gapless microlenses", where nearly all of the light incident on the sensor winds up falling on some pixel or other.