6 ms·

Canon 250MP APS-H CMOS Sensor Demo

33 points by davidbarker 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago
Nice demo, folks who've looked at wall sized Gigapixel image prints have had fun with this for a while. What is depressing of course is that a few of these in blimp hovering at 79,000' would make for "easy" real time surveillance of a large city. And make the DARPA ISIS project[1] much more cost effective. [1] http://www.gizmag.com/go/6236/ http://www.gizmag.com/go/6236/
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Hasselblad has had sensors like these for a while (though outrageously expensive, ~100K US, needs fancy cooling), I'd assume that the tech available to the various spy agencies is substantially better than what you can buy in a relatively normal way.
  - jrockway 11y ago
    Are those APS-H sensors? I thought Hasselblad specialized in medium format (6 cm x 4.5 cm sensors), and for their compact cameras, just rebadged other manufacturers' equipment.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      No, I wasn't referring to the sensor size, merely the resolution of the total array. This was a very large camera back (16x9 or something to that effect which had to do with the application it was put to work for) at a company I visited several years ago, the thing had at that time 14K x 8K resolution (so ~125 MP) and they were working on getting an even larger one. It was a custom job, not something 'off the shelf' but if you wanted them badly enough more could be procured. The lens was something to behold as well. Anyway, clearly the size of the Canon sensor is extremely impressive, I did not intend to belittle their achievement, just that I'd fully expect various nation states to have access to gear with resolutions well in excess of this.
- ipsum2 11y ago
  Most, if not all lenses, cannot resolve at 250 megapixels at the size of a APS-H sensor. Most of them stop at 20-30 megapixels, just due to limitations in light diffraction. There are a few ways to get around this: developing better lens systems, increasing the size of the sensor, or using the gigapixel approach by stitching thousands of zoomed in photos together into one panorama.
- trhway 11y ago
  >What is depressing of course is that a few of these in blimp hovering at 79,000' would make for "easy" real time surveillance of a large city. thus i couldn't be accused of something i didn't do because there would be clear image of me doing something else at some other place. At the same time there would be a clear image of that cop shooting that black boy. It is a double edged sword, and instead of fighting total surveillance - which is just going to happen anyway - we need to embrace it and thus make sure that it is freely accessible not only to government, that public can freely use it to its benefit too.
  - gherkin0 11y ago
    > thus i couldn't be accused of something i didn't do because there would be clear image of me doing something else at some other place Unless you're indoors, under tree cover, in a car/bus/train, on the other side of a building, etc. > we need to embrace it and thus make sure that it is freely accessible not only to government, that public can freely use it to its benefit too Yeah, that's not going to happen. Even if such a system was built and opened up to the public, people would use it to do things like stalk exes, plan and execute crimes, and just generally be nosey and annoying.
- dharma1 11y ago
  already happening https://theintercept.com/fieldofvision/the-above https://theintercept.com/fieldofvision/the-above
analog31 11y ago
That's pretty cool. A lens that can resolve 16k elements in each direction must be a pretty impressive engineering feat by itself. I do a little bit of optical design, not enough to know whether or not such a lens is possible at the state of the art today. When can I get one in my phone? ;-)
rodgerd 11y ago
Canon's tech demos make the rate at which they dribble technologies into their cameras all the more frustrating. Hopefully the attention Sony are getting will light a fire under them.
- georgemcbay 11y ago
  I used to be a nearly 100% Canon shooter (as a pretty serious hobbyist photographer) and switched over to Sony when the A7 came out (have since bought about a dozen FE lenses, an A7ii and an A6000, so a complete system change) and it was entirely because of Canon's obvious self-gating; way too many camera bodies released that were basically last year's model with some tweak to the autofocus that they have been sitting on for years, etc. I don't doubt every manufacturer does to this to a degree, but Canon is absurd and unsubtle about it. The whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth that it would be almost impossible for them to get me back as a "fan" at this point, even if they stopped doing this.
  - jychang 11y ago
    > have since bought about a dozen FE lenses So... All of them? There are only about a dozen FE lenses released. The 3 Loxia lenses, the 2 Batis lenses, and the Sony 28, 35/1.4, 35/2, 55, 90, and the 4 zooms. That's basically the extent of the Sony FE system, which is still rather lacking compared to Nikon or Canon's 100-200 lenses.
    - georgemcbay 11y ago
      I have 3 Rokinon/Samyang lenses and 2 Venus/Laowa lenses in FE mount. Also the Sony 35/2, 55, 70-200, 28-70mm, 16-35mm and the 28. When I do the specific count, "about a dozen" comes to 11. I still have and use a fair number of Canon lenses with my Sony gear (using a cheap but effective Commlite EOS->FE adapter), but haven't bought any new Canon lenses since the switch. Obviously I don't count these lenses in my "about a dozen" as they aren't native FE. I also use a bunch of 80s era Olympus Zuiko lenses with my Sony gear, some Nikon glass and a bunch of oddball Russian lenses. While the complaint that the FE system is lacking lenses is true in a sense, the short flange distance between the mount and the sensor on the Sony mirrorless cameras means that if you're willing to deal with manual focus (which is pretty damn easy to deal with given the focus peaking abilities of these cameras) you have a whole universe of lens options since you can adapt virtually any lens to these cameras. If you really need autofocus, you can still adapt a lot of Sony Alpha lenses with pretty decent AF performance via the LAEA4 adapter, and the A7R-II apparently allows for very quick AF with EOS lenses (my Commlite adapter for the A7/A7ii allows autofocus, but it is so slow that manual focus works better most of the time).
svckr 11y ago
I think it's amazing they even manage to handle that insane amount of data. Say the sensor produces (only) 32bits per pixel, we still get 1GB per frame or 5GB per second for the claimed 5fps video. That would still max out a Thunderbolt 3 connection, and you'd need 10 times the speed of a modern SSD to store it (if you were to record raw video that is). And then they have their signal processing chips to compress that stuff in (near) realtime…
- mappu 11y ago
  I went to a talk recently about the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project. The talk was centered around the absolutely huge volume of data, the filtering process and the custom chips needed for signal processing. There's lots of work to do in this area!
- Apofis 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404974
Paul_S 11y ago
I think the demo proves that the sensor and lens combination does not resolve any more detail than a sub 1000 pound SLR. It produces more pixels but all the extra information is just optical distortions. It gets even worse with the telephoto lens when all you see is the heat rising through the air.
- baudehlo 11y ago
  You can't beat haze no matter what the lens is. Except maybe in space.
chillingeffect 11y ago
I like that the prototype camera is simply a metal box with a lens and a handle :) Reminds me of Neal Stephensons' Hole Hawg [ 1 ] [ 1 ] http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Thanks for that link! That's an excellent tool from an excellent company. I had one of their circular saws (the hand operated variety, not the table model) and accidentally dropped it down a 39' roof. I fully expected it to be a goner but to my surprise it worked just as well as before the drop, the saw body had a little scratch from the impact but that was about the extent of the damage. The Hole Hawg sounds interesting, I've never seen one but it is - like any other tool - judging by the story a tool to respect. I like tools like that, the ones that just do what you tell them to without any fuss. The biggest drill I have here is a Bosch contractor version, it's 'only' 1150 watts, spins really slow but makes drilling holes in just about anything deceptively easy. I'm always very conscious of my position relative to the tool and I'm very careful making sure that if it would seize that I can release the trigger. The day I bought it I wore out my previous drill on a hole in a concrete floor, it just died and gave up the ghost. The blue monster took care of that hole in about 1 second, doing it's lazy and surprisingly quiet spin. The contractors motto: don't force it, use a larger hammer :)
userbinator 11y ago
I wonder how many of those pixels are dead, since that is a huge IC and the yields are likely to be very low otherwise. Even a few thousand dead pixels scattered randomly throughout wouldn't be particularly noticeable though, as interpolation is used to mask them out.

33 points by davidbarker 11y ago

Nice demo, folks who've looked at wall sized Gigapixel image prints have had fun with this for a while. What is depressing of course is that a few of these in blimp hovering at 79,000' would make for "easy" real time surveillance of a large city. And make the DARPA ISIS project[1] much more cost effective. [1] http://www.gizmag.com/go/6236/ http://www.gizmag.com/go/6236/

jacquesm 11y ago
Hasselblad has had sensors like these for a while (though outrageously expensive, ~100K US, needs fancy cooling), I'd assume that the tech available to the various spy agencies is substantially better than what you can buy in a relatively normal way.
- jrockway 11y ago
  Are those APS-H sensors? I thought Hasselblad specialized in medium format (6 cm x 4.5 cm sensors), and for their compact cameras, just rebadged other manufacturers' equipment.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    No, I wasn't referring to the sensor size, merely the resolution of the total array. This was a very large camera back (16x9 or something to that effect which had to do with the application it was put to work for) at a company I visited several years ago, the thing had at that time 14K x 8K resolution (so ~125 MP) and they were working on getting an even larger one. It was a custom job, not something 'off the shelf' but if you wanted them badly enough more could be procured. The lens was something to behold as well. Anyway, clearly the size of the Canon sensor is extremely impressive, I did not intend to belittle their achievement, just that I'd fully expect various nation states to have access to gear with resolutions well in excess of this.
ipsum2 11y ago
Most, if not all lenses, cannot resolve at 250 megapixels at the size of a APS-H sensor. Most of them stop at 20-30 megapixels, just due to limitations in light diffraction. There are a few ways to get around this: developing better lens systems, increasing the size of the sensor, or using the gigapixel approach by stitching thousands of zoomed in photos together into one panorama.
trhway 11y ago
>What is depressing of course is that a few of these in blimp hovering at 79,000' would make for "easy" real time surveillance of a large city. thus i couldn't be accused of something i didn't do because there would be clear image of me doing something else at some other place. At the same time there would be a clear image of that cop shooting that black boy. It is a double edged sword, and instead of fighting total surveillance - which is just going to happen anyway - we need to embrace it and thus make sure that it is freely accessible not only to government, that public can freely use it to its benefit too.
- gherkin0 11y ago
  > thus i couldn't be accused of something i didn't do because there would be clear image of me doing something else at some other place Unless you're indoors, under tree cover, in a car/bus/train, on the other side of a building, etc. > we need to embrace it and thus make sure that it is freely accessible not only to government, that public can freely use it to its benefit too Yeah, that's not going to happen. Even if such a system was built and opened up to the public, people would use it to do things like stalk exes, plan and execute crimes, and just generally be nosey and annoying.
dharma1 11y ago
already happening https://theintercept.com/fieldofvision/the-above https://theintercept.com/fieldofvision/the-above

analog31 11y ago

That's pretty cool. A lens that can resolve 16k elements in each direction must be a pretty impressive engineering feat by itself. I do a little bit of optical design, not enough to know whether or not such a lens is possible at the state of the art today. When can I get one in my phone? ;-)

rodgerd 11y ago

Canon's tech demos make the rate at which they dribble technologies into their cameras all the more frustrating. Hopefully the attention Sony are getting will light a fire under them.

georgemcbay 11y ago
I used to be a nearly 100% Canon shooter (as a pretty serious hobbyist photographer) and switched over to Sony when the A7 came out (have since bought about a dozen FE lenses, an A7ii and an A6000, so a complete system change) and it was entirely because of Canon's obvious self-gating; way too many camera bodies released that were basically last year's model with some tweak to the autofocus that they have been sitting on for years, etc. I don't doubt every manufacturer does to this to a degree, but Canon is absurd and unsubtle about it. The whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth that it would be almost impossible for them to get me back as a "fan" at this point, even if they stopped doing this.
- jychang 11y ago
  > have since bought about a dozen FE lenses So... All of them? There are only about a dozen FE lenses released. The 3 Loxia lenses, the 2 Batis lenses, and the Sony 28, 35/1.4, 35/2, 55, 90, and the 4 zooms. That's basically the extent of the Sony FE system, which is still rather lacking compared to Nikon or Canon's 100-200 lenses.
  - georgemcbay 11y ago
    I have 3 Rokinon/Samyang lenses and 2 Venus/Laowa lenses in FE mount. Also the Sony 35/2, 55, 70-200, 28-70mm, 16-35mm and the 28. When I do the specific count, "about a dozen" comes to 11. I still have and use a fair number of Canon lenses with my Sony gear (using a cheap but effective Commlite EOS->FE adapter), but haven't bought any new Canon lenses since the switch. Obviously I don't count these lenses in my "about a dozen" as they aren't native FE. I also use a bunch of 80s era Olympus Zuiko lenses with my Sony gear, some Nikon glass and a bunch of oddball Russian lenses. While the complaint that the FE system is lacking lenses is true in a sense, the short flange distance between the mount and the sensor on the Sony mirrorless cameras means that if you're willing to deal with manual focus (which is pretty damn easy to deal with given the focus peaking abilities of these cameras) you have a whole universe of lens options since you can adapt virtually any lens to these cameras. If you really need autofocus, you can still adapt a lot of Sony Alpha lenses with pretty decent AF performance via the LAEA4 adapter, and the A7R-II apparently allows for very quick AF with EOS lenses (my Commlite adapter for the A7/A7ii allows autofocus, but it is so slow that manual focus works better most of the time).

svckr 11y ago

I think it's amazing they even manage to handle that insane amount of data. Say the sensor produces (only) 32bits per pixel, we still get 1GB per frame or 5GB per second for the claimed 5fps video. That would still max out a Thunderbolt 3 connection, and you'd need 10 times the speed of a modern SSD to store it (if you were to record raw video that is). And then they have their signal processing chips to compress that stuff in (near) realtime…

mappu 11y ago
I went to a talk recently about the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project. The talk was centered around the absolutely huge volume of data, the filtering process and the custom chips needed for signal processing. There's lots of work to do in this area!
Apofis 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404974

Paul_S 11y ago

I think the demo proves that the sensor and lens combination does not resolve any more detail than a sub 1000 pound SLR. It produces more pixels but all the extra information is just optical distortions. It gets even worse with the telephoto lens when all you see is the heat rising through the air.

baudehlo 11y ago
You can't beat haze no matter what the lens is. Except maybe in space.

chillingeffect 11y ago

I like that the prototype camera is simply a metal box with a lens and a handle :) Reminds me of Neal Stephensons' Hole Hawg [ 1 ] [ 1 ] http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

jacquesm 11y ago
Thanks for that link! That's an excellent tool from an excellent company. I had one of their circular saws (the hand operated variety, not the table model) and accidentally dropped it down a 39' roof. I fully expected it to be a goner but to my surprise it worked just as well as before the drop, the saw body had a little scratch from the impact but that was about the extent of the damage. The Hole Hawg sounds interesting, I've never seen one but it is - like any other tool - judging by the story a tool to respect. I like tools like that, the ones that just do what you tell them to without any fuss. The biggest drill I have here is a Bosch contractor version, it's 'only' 1150 watts, spins really slow but makes drilling holes in just about anything deceptively easy. I'm always very conscious of my position relative to the tool and I'm very careful making sure that if it would seize that I can release the trigger. The day I bought it I wore out my previous drill on a hole in a concrete floor, it just died and gave up the ghost. The blue monster took care of that hole in about 1 second, doing it's lazy and surprisingly quiet spin. The contractors motto: don't force it, use a larger hammer :)

userbinator 11y ago

I wonder how many of those pixels are dead, since that is a huge IC and the yields are likely to be very low otherwise. Even a few thousand dead pixels scattered randomly throughout wouldn't be particularly noticeable though, as interpolation is used to mask them out.