Canon has revealed a 250-megapixel image sensor that is capable of distinguishing “the lettering on the side of an airplane flying at a distance of approximately 18 km (11 mi) from the shooting location”. The sensor is not commercially available, but to be fair no camera would be able of actually processing an image that size in a reasonable amount of time.
The APS-H sensor has a resolution of 19580×12600, which translates into what is actually 246.7-megapixels. Canon has been quite liberal with its rounding up of numbers, but we can hardly blame them in this case. It is also capable of shooting at 5 fps, although it comes at a price. ArsTechnica estimates that a single image from the camera would be around 350MB each, and shooting at 5 fps would require a PCIe M.2 SSD to even save it in time. Something that no camera in the world has yet.
While this is impressive, Canon is not planning a retail release for the image sensor. Instead, it is looking to use it for “specialized surveillance and crime prevention tools, ultra-high resolution measuring instruments and other industrial equipment.”
Still, it could still be possible that Canon will slap it into a camera at some point in the future. The company could just be waiting for the cost of building the insanely sized sensor to drop before it tries mass production.
[Source: Ars Technica]
