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> Blackmagic does have e.g. a 12k non-stereo Ursa Cine But that’s still not 16k of pixels. You don’t even need two 8k sensors to make this work. Just aim the

> Blackmagic does have e.g. a 12k non-stereo Ursa Cine But that’s still not 16k of pixels. You don’t even need two 8k sensors to make this work. Just aim the stereo lenses at different parts of a 16k sensor. The Canon solution is simply lacking IPD and pixels. > Sensor area (for equivalent class sensors) determines the quality of the recording. This is false. Going to get up on my soapbox again here: Larger sensors actually have more noise (noise is proportional the square root of the area). It’s easy to understand the confusion, though: Putting a larger sensor behind the same lens is the opposite of cropping… you get a larger field of view and less image detail. Thus, keeping field of view the same, a larger sensor forces you to use a lens with a longer focal length. Now, if you re-grind the original lens to have a longer focal length, you encounter another problem: The same physical aperture divided by the new longer focal length means that you have a smaller focal ratio (the number in F/<number> gets bigger). You have a dimmer lens! So, to keep the same focal ratio (“F-stop”), you need a lens with a larger physical aperture… That larger physical aperture is collecting more light onto your sensor! That’s why everyone seems to think larger sensors are better. It’s the lens you are forced to use, not the sensor itself. Since light collected is directly proportional to the area of the lens (and lens area will be proportional to sensor area, see above) and sensor noise is only proportional to sqrt(area), the signal to noise ratio goes as area/sqrt(area) = sqrt(area). But that’s not the same thing as saying a larger sensor is better… you could have just used a lens with a larger physical aperture in the first place. You don’t need a larger sensor to do that.

formerly_proven 2y ago
> But that’s not the same thing as saying a larger sensor is better… you could have just used a lens with a larger physical aperture in the first place. You don’t need a larger sensor to do that. Most optical aberrations increase with high powers of the f-number so it's highly undesirable to make ultra-fast lenses, so it quite quickly becomes cheaper to use a larger sensor with a slower f-number. Try matching a jellybean 85/2 lens on a full-frame sensor on e.g. MFT. It's going to be rather expensive. Then try matching a 85/1.4 or 85/1.2 (nowadays not uncommon) lens and you find yourself at "that's not physically possible". Coincidentally, full-frame sensors can be made from just two stitched exposures on a regular chip stepper, so they're sort of the largest sensor size before cost explodes. Meanwhile S35/APS-C offers some real cost savings (single exposure).
fxtentacle 2y ago
As someone who has designed a customised camera with a CMOS sensor, I feel the urge to disagree: in my experience, the biggest issue for quality was that the sensor readout generates heat and that heat triggers random charges in the sensor. Using a sensor with larger pixels means the readout energy is spread over a larger area, thereby having a lower intensity. So in a way, a larger sensor works like a larger heatsink. This effect is also why astronomy photographers cool their equipment. You're of course correct that the better lens helps. But a bigger sensor can also be better by itself.

formerly_proven 2y ago

> But that’s not the same thing as saying a larger sensor is better… you could have just used a lens with a larger physical aperture in the first place. You don’t need a larger sensor to do that. Most optical aberrations increase with high powers of the f-number so it's highly undesirable to make ultra-fast lenses, so it quite quickly becomes cheaper to use a larger sensor with a slower f-number. Try matching a jellybean 85/2 lens on a full-frame sensor on e.g. MFT. It's going to be rather expensive. Then try matching a 85/1.4 or 85/1.2 (nowadays not uncommon) lens and you find yourself at "that's not physically possible". Coincidentally, full-frame sensors can be made from just two stitched exposures on a regular chip stepper, so they're sort of the largest sensor size before cost explodes. Meanwhile S35/APS-C offers some real cost savings (single exposure).

fxtentacle 2y ago

As someone who has designed a customised camera with a CMOS sensor, I feel the urge to disagree: in my experience, the biggest issue for quality was that the sensor readout generates heat and that heat triggers random charges in the sensor. Using a sensor with larger pixels means the readout energy is spread over a larger area, thereby having a lower intensity. So in a way, a larger sensor works like a larger heatsink. This effect is also why astronomy photographers cool their equipment. You're of course correct that the better lens helps. But a bigger sensor can also be better by itself.