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."

back to old style camera sizes?

[magarity]

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.

Re:no resolution

[magarity]

it's be great if it were something lame like 6 megapixel
 
Why is 6 mp lame? Do you know the Hubble is something like .8 mp and it takes amazing pictures because the sensor is huge. Like this thing.

Re:what is the spectral response?

[commodore64_love]

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."

Re:Shutter speed

[Entropius]

At the moment highspeed photography is limited by how fast the shutters will go. The larger focal-plane shutters used for this larger format are likely to be even slower than the ones used on today's DSLR's.

My camera, a bog-standard Olympus DSLR, can do up to 1/4000. Nicer cameras can do 1/8000, but I don't know of any off-the-shelf DSLR that can do faster.

I can shoot 1/4000 at ISO 800 f/5.6 in sunlight. With a f/2.8 lens (you'd use at least f/2.8 for highspeed work, f/2 if you can get it) you can get up to 1/8000 in outdoor light at a reasonable ISO. (Four Thirds cameras can do ISO 800 with reasonable quality; the best APS-C, like the Nikon D300, can do ISO 1600; fullframe can do ISO 3200.)

This thing might be able to get up to 1/8000 in worse light, but only if you can find a f/2.8 or f/2 lens for it. Large-format lenses tend to be slow.

Re:no resolution

[treeves]

And how is a higher resolution sensor going to undo lens aberrations? That would be nice.

Re:No free lunch

[ffreeloader]

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.

Re:back to old style camera sizes?

[Jeremy Erwin]

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.

Ansel Adams used a 4x5 camera---large format [wikipedia.org]. Had this been available in his day, he might well have used it.

Re:what we could get?

[hedwards]

It's because the photosites are further apart and the lenses over the individual photosites are larger. Meaning that you can crank up the gain further without increasing the interference between photosites and have more light available to begin with. Basically you end up with more photons being directed at the photosite and less chance of energy generated at other photosites from interfering.

Re:Coming soon?

[shawb]

The point of the larger sensor is low light photography, NOT more data or higher pixel counts. Each "pixel" on the sensor itself is physically larger so they can more accurately report the light levels hitting them without introducing grain.

This sensor isn't for consumer point and click cameras or anything like that... this will be for things like scientific instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, nocturnal wildlife and deep ocean photography (and of course for military and homeland security applications.)

Re:no resolution

[lxs]

You have to take into account noise on fingernail sized sensors. On this scale at 6MP, the noise floor would be very low.

Re:Coming soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a CCD, it is a CMOS image sensor. Big difference.

Re:no resolution

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:no resolution

[Mr Z]

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.