
Canon's 120MP Camera Sensor - artsandsci
https://petapixel.com/2018/03/29/this-is-the-power-of-canons-120mp-camera-sensor/
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Lio
There's not much discussion about high ISO noise. I'd be interested to know
how such a high pixel density affects that. If they could keep that desesity
on a medium format sized sensor it would really be amazing and would really
give large format 8x10 film a run for its money.

Hasselblad offer a 100MP 53 x 40mm sensor which they can then use to capture
pseudo 400MP images. That's based on a multishot system where they can move
the sensor by, I think, half a pixel by shaking the sensor. Only good for
things like landscapes that don't move but still amazing.

(Also, off topic but I'm pretty sure the watch used there is an Omega
Speedmaster Professional.

I'm not sure if impressed or ashamed that I can recognise it from its
unbranded movement.)

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jacquesm
> Only good for things like landscapes that don't move but still amazing.

And also _very_ good for high resolution document imaging, such as 300 DPI
newspaper shots.

Here is a blurb about that sensor:

[https://www.hasselblad.com/press/press-
releases/hasselblad-i...](https://www.hasselblad.com/press/press-
releases/hasselblad-introduces-the-h6d-400c-ms/)

You're right about the watch, if you look at the bridge in the enlarged
picture you can still make out the blurred letters.

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simias
What's the advantage over a scanner? Speed?

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culot
A flatbed scanner, anyway, spreads its resolution over its whole plate area.
So if you want to scan something smaller than that full-size, you're getting a
fraction of its resolution.

Want to flatbed scan a 2" tintype or even a 4x6 photo? You'd probably be
better off using a camera instead, as you can fill the cameras imaging sensor
with the subject. You can also control the lighting conditions better with a
camera setup, so you don't get the obligatory flatbed scanner reflections.

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jrockway
That is not really how it works. Yes, a camera has a fixed array of dots and
to extract the maximum amount of information from that sensor, you have to
maximize the number of pixels covered by your image.

A scanner essentially just moves a single pixel over the source material. The
resolution is limited not by how much of the flatbed you cover, but by how
small that single pixel is and how precisely it can be moved. (And even the
size of the sensor is fungible, if you can move it precisely you can
oversample.)

Scanners have their downsides, no doubt, but raw resolution is their upside.
The downside is the time it takes for a scanner to make an image -- that is
why we carry around ultra-expensive silicon wafers for photography, and not a
single light-sensitive element that moves around under the lens's image
circle.

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hrktb
I think hat the parent is saying is that you can adjust the lens of the camera
to have the subject better fit the whole frame. For a scanner you’d need a
specific adaptor and there aren’t so many readily available.

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galago
A lot of cameras are sticking at 24MP because that's where a lot of lenses
start to reach a weak point. Also, file size to utility becomes a
consideration because most people expect cloud/sharing. I feel like 100+MP is
going to be an enthusiast thing for a long time. It seems a lot like car
speeds. Every car sold today can go over 100 miles per hour. Some people still
care about how fast their car can go, but most don't really think about it or
even know their car's top speed.

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dingaling
I have a couple of photography colleagues who use the 50MP Canon 5Ds. The
detail they gather is astounding, more than my 21.1MP can grab even with a
teleconvertor on the lens. So they can shoot with shorter focal lengths, which
means less weight and better stabilisation.

They can then go into post-processing and "crop the hell outta it" and still
end up with more detail than my image.

It is a cliché but high-density sensors really are a "game changer". They give
so much potential to reframe the photo after shooting, selecting the most
relevant area of the frame and _still_ having enough detail to blow-up to
prints.

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qume
A good quality 2x teleconverter will make your sensor the equivalent of 80mp
in this context.

Ie with the same lens, a 20mp camera with 2x teleconverter will resolve more
detail than a 50mp sensor.

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dingaling
But it's a losing race; adding a 2x teleconvertor halves the amount of light
received, so I have to drop my shutter speed and / or raise the ISO to
compensate. Both of which are disruptive to image detail.

Plus the distorting effect of the extra glass in the lightpath.

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lb1lf
-Unless I am much mistaken, a 2x teleconverter will cost you two stops - meaning 1/4 of the light. (I’ve mostly used a rangefinder in later years; they do not lend themselves well to teleconverters. :-)

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qume
You lose almost no light.

You are changing the area of the sensor the part of the scene is spread over.

Its a triviality as a result of us expressing the F number as the ratio of the
focal length and the aperture size.

The effective SNR of the sensor is increased due to more sensor being used for
a given part of the scene, so the lower light level does not increase noise
comparatively.

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overcast
Ever climbing megapixel is awesome and all, but I want ever increasing ISO
performance. Low light is where the real innovation is. Especially in my line
of business with food photography.

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tlb
If you're doing still photos of food, surely you can just put more light on
the subject or use a longer exposure.

With modern sensors, ISO is mainly limited by thermal noise.
Astrophotographers often use cooled sensors to allow higher sensitivity, but
it's tricky to cool it very much without moisture from the air condensing
inside or on the lenses.

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munificent
_> If you're doing still photos of food, surely you can just put more light on
the subject or use a longer exposure._

Longer exposure, yes, though that means having to set up a tripod for every
shot which significantly increases the time it takes to get a shoot done.

Turning up the lighting is very difficult for food photography. Lights are hot
and food doesn't last long under studio lights. (That's also why a lot of food
photography has such shallow depth of field — a wider aperture lets in more
light.)

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ksk
>Turning up the lighting is very difficult for food photography. Lights are
hot and food doesn't last long under studio lights. (That's also why a lot of
food photography has such shallow depth of field — a wider aperture lets in
more light.)

Sure, but that's only if you use non-LED continuous lighting. Alternatively,
you could use flash and then not need a longer exposure. As long as you can
balance the ambient with a low enough continuous light that it wont affect the
food. Plenty of ways to skin the cat..

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overcast
Flashes, and external lights are not really realistic in a busy restaurant
environment. Majority of my shots are using natural light. I usually scope out
places ahead of time, find the best seating by time of day, near windows.

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ksk
I guess we all assumed still pictures of food in a studio instead of just
asking you :)

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andrewla
Nokia made two cameras, the Lumia 1020 and Lumia 808, that featured a 41MP
camera. For the most part, the use case was pretty much to immediately
downsample or use the high resolution as a way to create a synthetic high-
quality digital zoom. The low-light quality was excellent as well.

The sensor was 8.80×6.60 mm (as opposed to the APS-H sensor here, at
29.22×20.20mm), which means 3x the sensor density. I've been waiting for a
while for this "Pureview" technology to show up anywhere else; it's surprising
to me that it has not.

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Joeri
I had a lumia 950 which had “only” a 20 MP sensor and the low light
photography was stunning, better than what I saw with my own eyes in some
cases. It was very slow though (even in daylight), which made it useless at
action shots, so I guess other phones optimize for speed over image quality.

I did make some absolutely breathtaking landscape shots with that 950, and
I’ve never made pictures that nice since switching to an iphone.

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z3t4
pic or it never happened :P

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JKCalhoun
I've been pining for a greyscale digital camera. I think maybe Leica had one
but it seemed overly pricey (to the surprise of no, I suppose). Price aside
though, having only the one I am aware of is slim pickings.

With no Bayer filter I expect four times the pixel density with no gain in
noise (and in fact a slight improvement in speed since the lossiness of the
filter is removed from the light path).

I guess I want the sharp, medium format portraits we saw from the 1960's — but
digital.

I've considered building my own by either:

1) using a telescope CCD and building my own camera, or 2) try to remove the
Bayer filter from the CCD.

I dislike both those options....

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DanCarvajal
you could pay someone else to do it
[https://www.monochromeimaging.com/](https://www.monochromeimaging.com/)

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igivanov
The problem of RAW conversion remains because every converter will still de-
Bayer files from such a camera and thus degrade the IQ.

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DanCarvajal
I don't know, seems like the conversion works well enough. You're always going
to edit and change files in export anyways.

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david-cako
I love how they choose 1080p to compare it to as though we should give a shit
what 1080p stills look like on a 5D Mark IV.

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Skunkleton
Yeah, 1080p is less impressive when you call it 2MP.

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Animats
This is going to be big for surveillance cams. Just put a fisheye lens on them
and collect a hemisphere. There are already 4K fisheye surveillance cams. You
do pan, tilt, and zoom later.

Next step is face popout in a GPU. Faces, license plates, and other items of
interest can be saved at high resolution and the rest compressed to a lower
level of detail.

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landcoctos
Ah, I was waiting for the surveillance example in the video... they didn't
disappoint and it was the last example.

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black_puppydog
Did I miss something? It was the _only_ example! The video goes directly from

"Look at the high-res awesome awesomeness!" to

"Future Applications: Wide-area monitoring (a.k.a. video surveillance)"

EDIT: I find that depressing. Seriously? With tech like that, you can't at
least come up with a more benign example? You really _have_ to throw yourself
at mayors and other hawks first?

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zo1
You don't even need such a high-resolution sensor. At that level, you might as
well have multiple cameras and stitch the results together.

And the military has already done it. See here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare)

and here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-
IS)

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slantyyz
Sometimes the high-resolution sensor is used in place of a zoom lens (i.e.,
use "digital zoom" to 1:1). This way the camera's primary lens is simpler
because it has a shorter focal length and there's less to break down. Can
probably bring the costs down a little too.

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zokier
> All pixel progressive reading of 9.4fps

> RAW photos shot by the sensor weigh in at 210MB each.

1974 MB/s. Finally an use-case for Intels fancy 3d-xpoint memory?

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awalton
Knowing Canon it _still_ only supports 1080p video...

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ivanech
The fact that this captures at 9.4 fps means comparing the image to 1080p
_kind of_ makes sense, but I wish they had a comparison to a more practical
still resolution between 24-50 MP.

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dmitriid
Hmmm... Technical merits aside, have you noticed that the only "future
applications" they could come up with is surveillance?

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deckar01
> If you’d like one in the future, though, you should probably start
> stockpiling hard drives: RAW photos shot by the sensor weigh in at 210MB
> each.

I would be more worried about the amount of RAM you need to comfortably edit
these photos.

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agumonkey
Happy to hear that Canon is going medical.

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bluetwo
OK but where is my SX70?

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arich2day
Confirmed for iPhone 2020

