Canon's new 202x205mm sensor next to a traditional 35mm (36x24mm) sensor used in high end DSLRs. Image courtesy of Canon Inc.
Canon, the digital camera giant, has just announced the development of a new CMOS sensor with dimensions of 202 x 205mm, which is about 48 times the area of film or sensors used in traditional 35mm photography, and some 108 times the area of sensors currently used in most consumer DSLRs by Canon and others.
But why the need for a such a large sensor? In photography, size matters, and the larger your light-sensitive surface, the more light you can capture, and thus the dimmer the objects you’ll be able to record. That’s exactly what researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Kiso Observatory wanted, as now they’ll be able to record movies of meteors with an apparent magnitude as dim as 10, compared to 7, which was the dimmest that was previously possible. The sensor has been mounted on the focal plane of the Kiso Observatory’s 105 cm Schmidt telescope enabling the recording of 60fps movies with a field of view of 3.3° x 3.3°.
Read the full press release here.