Canon announced that it has created a new… 410MP, 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor“The largest number of pixels ever achieved” in a sensor of this size.
Given the level of detail the new sensor can capture, Canon expects it to be used by “surveillance, medicine and industry”, where there is a demand for “ultimate resolution”. With a 410-megapixel resolution, the Canon sensor has a resolution of 24K, which is 198 times greater than HD and 12 times greater than 8K. This makes it easy to crop and then enlarge the image captured by the sensor without losing detail.
Very high pixel counts are usually limited to cameras with medium-sized sensors. But the beauty of Canon cramming that many pixels into 35mm is that it should be possible to use them “with lenses for full-frame sensors.”
Canon had to make more than a few design changes to achieve this. The new sensor has a redesigned circuitry pattern and a “backlit stack formation” where “the pixel part and the signal processing part overlap.” This translates to a read speed of 3,280 megapixels per second, and video at eight frames per second. Canon says the monochrome version of the sensor can group four pixels together at once to capture brighter photos and capture “100-megapixel video at 24 frames per second.”
It doesn’t look like this type of sensor will make it into a consumer camera any time soon, but the fact that this level of miniaturization is possible means that one day it could be, for photography professionals who want it.