Friday, February 14, 2025

Canon develops CMOS sensor with 410 megapixels

The largest number of pixels ever achieved in a 35 mm full-frame sensor.

On January 22, 2025, Canon Inc. made a groundbreaking announcement: They have developed a highly high-resolution 410-megapixel CMOS sensor.

It has the highest number of pixels achieved in a 35mm full-frame sensor (24,592 x 16,704 pixels). This sensor is expected to be used in fields that need very detailed images, such as surveillance, medical imaging, and industrial applications.

The new CMOS sensor from Canon is truly impressive. Here’s a simplified summary:

Resolution: Equivalent to 24K, 198 times greater than Full HD, and 12 times greater than 8K. This allows users to crop parts of an image and enlarge them significantly while maintaining high quality.

Size: Unlike other high-pixel sensors, which are usually medium-format or larger, this sensor fits into a 35mm full-frame format. This makes it compatible with lenses for full-frame cameras and helps make the shooting equipment smaller.

Canon EOS R5 mirrorless camera will shoot in 8K at 30 fps

Speed: Achieving high pixel counts usually slows down data readout, but this sensor uses advanced signal processing technology, a back-illuminated stacked formation, and redesigned circuitry patterns. As a result, it can read out data at a super-high speed of 3,280 megapixels per second and deliver video at 8 frames per second.

Thanks to its ‘four-pixel binning’ function, this sensor can virtually treat four adjoining pixels as one. Hence, it offers improved sensitivity and can capture brighter images. The sensor can also capture 100-megapixel video at 24 frames per second while using this function.

The sensor will be displayed at the Canon booth at SPIE Photonics West, a leading global conference for optics and photonics held in San Francisco from January 28 to 30, 2025.

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