Canon breaks new sensor records with no regrets

Sep 7, 2015 14:57 GMT  ·  By

Canon wants to break records again after it managed to build, for the last couple of years, massive 50-megapixel sensors for enthusiast photographers and surveillance companies or authorities and broke its record again back in 2010 with the world's first 120 MP APS-H-sized CMOS sensor.

Canon being basically a bunch of responsible Japanese engineers who have absolutely no sense of humor decided to put the same, already aging APS-H sensor to even more Moore's Law pressure, at least as much light diffraction allows it. And to make things even less funny, the same very serious Japanese engineers decided to place this extremely crammed sensor in a consumer DSLR.

Claiming that the new APS-H CMOS sensor allows "distinguishing of lettering on the side of an airplane flying at a distance of approximately 18 km [11 miles] from the shooting location," Canon's latest monster sensor is not also extremely dense but fast as well.

Dense, high-resolution, impressive but still not a "full frame" sensor

It has a readout speed of 1.25 billion pixels per second so that means it will churn about five 19,580 x 12,600 pixels frames per second. Although, sounding pretty absurd for any mortal to wield such a beast, there are a couple of things one must remember

First, it isn't made for consumer market, at least not now, since it is specifically designed for "specialized surveillance and crime prevention tools, ultra-high resolution measuring instruments and other industrial equipment." That means police, army, secret services and all sorts of other "specialized" professions.

Canon says that the video footage captured by the cameras equipped with the 250-megapixel CMOS sensor achieved a level of resolution that was about 125 times that of Full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) video and approximately 30 times that of 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) video. With this in mind, it's very likely we'll hear cops shouting "enhance" in police tech-rooms more often than in the past.

The other thing worth mentioning is that, although big for its 29.2mm by 20.2 mm size, certainly larger than what we'd find in Nikon and even Canon's entry-level DSLRs, it's not really a 35mm-equivalent "full frame" sensor that is used by professionals and photography enthusiasts.