Canon recently announced that the company is developing a new complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) sensor that can deliver 250-megapixel resolution.
The CMOS sensor measures 29mm x 20mm which is APS-H size. Despite its ultra-small size, the sensor pack a whooping resolution of 19,580 x 12,600. To put things in perspective, the Canon 5DS and Canon 5DS R currently holds the highest-resolution for any commercial grade DSLR camera, and the two cameras only boasts a resolution of 50.6-megapixel on a larger full-frame sensor.
The Canon 250MP prototype can deliver a resolution of up to 250 million pixels which is roughly 30 times the resolution of a 4K video.
Canon released a press release on Monday. To highlight its new sensor's capabilities, Canon wrote, "The newly developed sensor was able to capture images enabling the distinguishing of lettering on the side of an airplane flying at a distance of approximately 18 km from the shooting location."
Canon claims that its new sensor has a readout speed of 1.25 billion pixels per second. Despite the massive resolution, videos captured by the sensor are only limited to five frames per second.
According to Ars Technica, Canon failed to mention on its press release that the files produced by its new 250-megapixel sensor are huge. A single RAW image taken from a 5DS camera is about 70MB. In comparison, a single RAW image taken from the new 250-megapixel sensor will be around 350MB in size.
Currently, there are not a lot of field that requires a 250-megapixel sensor aside from high-end imaging required in the medical and surveillance community.