The company says its new sensor is capable of distinguishing the lettering on the side of an airplane from 18 km away, i.e., 11.1 miles. APS-H is a sensor size bigger than APS-C but smaller than full-frame and is mainly used on Canon’s legacy EOS-1D line of DSLRs. The sensor has a fast signal readout speed of 1.25 billion pixels a second. Canon says it has good noise performance despite the pixel count. Also, the sensor can be used to capture incredibly high-resolution video, about 30 times sharper than 4K at five frames per second. The new sensor has a fast signal readout speed of 1.25 billion pixels per second. Canon claims that the sensor has good noise performance despite of the huge pixel count. Videos can be captured at incredibly high resolution using the sensor and the videos will be 30 times sharper than 4K at five frames per second.
Canon says the new sensor technology will not be used for commercial purposes as of now and will be put to use as crime prevention tools, specialized surveillance, ultra-high-resolution measuring instruments, field of visual expression and other industrial equipment. However the sensor would not find a place in the smartphones for now, but the company claims that the sensor can be accommodated in a relatively small camera body. Canon’s achievement of using the sensor along with a prototype camera, to reading the lettering on an airplane over 11 miles away is quite awesome. However, it is a little difficult to tell how much of that magic is the sensor, as the company has not revealed any details about the camera or lens used. The technology is still in the development phase but it might enter mainstream photography in the next few years.
