Canon 120 million pixel CMOS sensor developed

Canon recently announced that it has successfully developed an APS-H format CMOS image sensor with 120 million pixels (photo resolution 13280x9184), which is the largest resolution that can be achieved by this size sensor.

At present, the Canon EOS 1D series uses the APS-H format sensor, which has a sensitive area of 29.2x20.2mm, but the maximum pixel count is only 16.1 million pixels. Canon's newly developed CMOS chip has 7.5 times the number of pixels and 2.4 times the resolution.

In CMOS image sensors, although the problem of ultra-high pixel shooting can be solved by parallel reading technology, the parallel processing of a large amount of data may still lead to the problem of signal delay or unsynchronization. On this CMOS of up to 120 million pixels, Canon has improved the read delay control technology to achieve ultra-high-speed read, which can support high-speed continuous shooting of 9.5 photos per second.

In addition, the CMOS sensor can also support 1920x1080 resolution full HD video shooting. Because the number of pixels is too high, the CMOS only needs to use 1/60 of the sensitive area to output full HD video, leaving a very interesting imagination for future applications.

In 2007, Canon developed a 50 million pixel APS-H format CMOS, and the 120 million pixel CMOS is its successor. However, this CMOS is currently only for research and development purposes, and there are no mass production plans. Obviously, the application of such a high pixel sensor will give the camera image processing, storage and other modules to bring a doubling of the data pressure, I believe that we have to wait a few years before we will see a digital camera equipped with hundreds of millions of pixels CMOS appear on the market.