Canon has built a 50 megapixel CMOS sensor - but it's not destined to be found in your future DSLR, apparently…
The technology is being fashioned toward some form of large format surveillance camera - whilst such resolution may prove integral for detail, it does pose some potential issues too:
50 million pixels on a 19 x 28mm sensor surface?
That's right - the same sensor size as you'd find in the EOS-1D MKIII - not even as large as the 36 x 24mm Canon full frame sensor.
Now that's some serious cramming!
So either there's some kind of technological improvement to maintain light sensitivity and keep noise to a minimum, or there's something that we're not being told.
Given that the approach is not aimed at the consumer market - why would you manufacture such a sensor on an existing popular sensor size unless it were to have future application within consumer applications.
Hasselblad's 48 x 36mm sensors max out at 39megapixels - which brings with it a 120MB RAW file per frame!
So the next issue is bandwidth - transferring a 50megapixel would be far from rapid!
The truth of the application seems nothing but speculative, and continues the whole megapixel debate furthermore - where this will push things in the future, we shall just have to wait and see...
