Canon Very Large Sensor Media Format Mirrorless 1Dx2 style Camera Seen in Wild

Jul 28, 2015
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50MP burst at 25 frames per second? To put that in perspective, that is 5x the data throughput as the 1Dx2 (20MP, 14fps) - and given that they kept the 1Dx2 at 20MP to permit the processor to manage 14fps that is a huge leap. You also need to consider that they are limited by the speed at which the card can write data.
Either the buffer is only 5 frames (0.2 seconds, no good for wildlife) or they have multiple processors which means a significantly bigger camera. And who has developed a new CF card for that speed?
 
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Feb 26, 2012
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AB
but it would not be as impressive as the LS911 for sheer size of sensor.
If size matters and you wanna get BIG, don't putz around. ;)

http://largesense.com/

LS911-Front-View-1920.jpg


LS911-Side-View.jpg


does raw 4k video too.
 
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@Aglet:
Funny camera, sensor is larger than my notebooks screen ...
Only drawbacks: 12MPix only + monochrome only.
But using the unique look with large format lenses + tilt / shift + 4k movie + RGB colors with RGB filter sets would make the use of such a anachronistic dinosaur cam an adventure! But the price near 100 000 $ is a little bit too high at the moment :)
 
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neuroanatomist said:
Still we have only a big wall of words and NO pictures. So I will share a PICTURE.

Yeah, but at least he concedes that it's an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence. He also claims the evidence will come soon after NAB, so we get to poke fun at the claims for another few weeks; after that, he'll either have the goods or he won't. If we don't see evidence by mid-May I think the CR Supreme Court will be ready to hand down a ruling of "shenanigans."
 
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Hector1970

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Mar 22, 2012
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I'm sure it's not beyond the bounds of possibilities Canon are looking at medium format and I'm sure a group like the military might order a very specialised type of camera with an extra large sensor and a high frame rate. However the whole tread and the information in it sounds like coming from someone with an over active imagination and is probably finding this thread very funny.
Maybe the camera is being used to photograph UFO's.
 
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Jun 20, 2013
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Hector1970 said:
I'm sure it's not beyond the bounds of possibilities Canon are looking at medium format and I'm sure a group like the military might order a very specialised type of camera with an extra large sensor and a high frame rate. However the whole tread and the information in it sounds like coming from someone with an over active imagination and is probably finding this thread very funny.
Maybe the camera is being used to photograph UFO's.

I'm thinking elvis has one already.
 
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Don Haines

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Jun 4, 2012
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scyrene said:
Orangutan said:
Hector1970 said:
Maybe the camera is being used to photograph UFO's.

Get real! Everyone knows that UFO's appear only on Sony sensors. :p

I was gonna say, this is the perfect camera for photographing Bigfoot ::)
but unlike bigfoot, only one person claims to have seen the camera....
 
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Jul 21, 2010
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Canon Rumors said:
As far as we know, there are only 2 DSLRs and 1 Cinema EOS camera coming the rest of the 2017.

So that means this 120 MP medium format mirrorless with a full complement of lenses is coming in 2018, right? Well, at least the 50 fps frame rate will come in handy to capture the droplets of rainbow juice in unicorn farts. I assume the new system will come with a 1000mm f/4...as we all know, unicorns are skittish creatures.
 
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Canon Rumors said:
Well this thread was a fun read, I missed it from a few weeks ago.

As far as we know, there are only 2 DSLRs and 1 Cinema EOS camera coming the rest of the 2017.

  • EOS 6D Mark II
  • EOS Rebel SL2
  • Cinema EOS C200 (won't be C100 Mark III)

If that changes, we'll let you know.

====

****************
***** SPECIAL NOTE: The math stated below is WRONG!
***** A second comment below this message gives a full explanation
***** as to why, but this message will be left AS IS for posterity's sake!
***** "HarryFilm"
****************

As per a previous poster I am CONCEDING that my statements are UNSUBSTANTIATED and as of yet UNCONFIRMED! ...BUT....on a personal level, I do must give some considerable weight to those rumours due to the credibility and credentials of the Netherlands/Germany contacts. Again, we shall about how much proof is in the old pudding and do wait and see until after NAB 2017.

On another subject, in terms of speed of 25 fps burst rate, the math is as follows:

8192h x 6036v pixels = 49,446,912 pixels
at 48 bits per pixel (16 bits per RGB/YCbCr colour channel)

= 148,340,736 bytes per frame x 25 fps

= 3,708,518,400 bytes per second or about 3.7 Gigabytes per second RAW.

from a computing perspective even at the 700 MHZ to 1.5 GHZ of most ARM-based CPU chips such as the DIGIC-6 and DIGIC-7, one only needs four gigabytes of DRAM or VRAM to hold that before writing out to SSD/Flash Cards in 30 seconds or less on the cheaper Flash Cards. To add four gigabytes of VRAM and a decent interface between the memory and the DIGIC chip would be less than 75 Euros for Canon!

The fastest Flash Cards that could still be considered affordable are around 100 megabytes per second with the best at 160 megs per second. With dual cards you could stripe/interleave the image writing and move 4 gigabytes from VRAM to Fast Flash in 10-to-15 seconds or less which on a technical basis for RAW uncompressed format is pretty good!

For Wavelet based JPEG-2000 images 10:1 to 30:1 compression rates, I will calculate a rate of less then 5 seconds to transfer 4 gigabytes to interleaved fast dual Flash Cards. If the SATA interface option is true, then write speeds of 500+ megabytes per second would be possible so two or three seconds for four gigabytes of RAW images when using striped mode is all that would be needed in terms of write time. (i.e. two SATA drives writing at same time). JPEG-2000 compressed images would have an unlimited write time at 25 fps at 10:1 to 30:1 compression rates to SATA drives.

Again, this is NOT a technically difficult thing to do. In my own workplace we transfer multi-terabyte video files and even whole PETABYTE (1000 Terabyte files!) in mere tens of seconds using multiple 100 gigabit Ethernet connections and RAID-0-to-RAID-5 drives. So for a company as big as Canon, this is not a big deal to accomplish at a reasonable price. This is probably ONE REASON why one of the specifications that was emailed to me indicated that an attached twin-drive SATA interface was available so that 4 gigabytes worth of 25 fps RAW image files could be transferred to disk in less than 3 to 5 seconds. That's an EDUCATED GUESS on my part but my calculations seem to hold up when I look at them a few times.

Again, we shall see soon enough......
 
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Fleetie

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Nov 22, 2010
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8192h x 6036v pixels = 49,446,912 pixels at 48 bits per pixel
(16 bits per RGB/YCbCr colour channel)= 148,340,736 bytes per frame x 25 fps = 3,708,518,400 bytes per second
or about 3.7 Gigabytes per second RAW.


Surely that should be 296,681,472 bytes per frame, i.e. a factor of 2 more than you claim?
Which in turn gives 6.9GB (GiB) per second?
 
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Jul 28, 2015
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HarryFilm said:
On another subject, in terms of speed of 25 fps burst rate, the math is as follows:

8192h x 6036v pixels = 49,446,912 pixels
at 48 bits per pixel (16 bits per RGB/YCbCr colour channel)

= 148,340,736 bytes per frame x 25 fps

= 3,708,518,400 bytes per second or about 3.7 Gigabytes per second RAW.

from a computing perspective even at the 700 MHZ to 1.5 GHZ of most ARM-based CPU chips such as the DIGIC-6 and DIGIC-7, one only needs four gigabytes of DRAM or VRAM to hold that before writing out to SSD/Flash Cards in 30 seconds or less on the cheaper Flash Cards. To add four gigabytes of VRAM and a decent interface between the memory and the DIGIC chip would be less than 75 Euros for Canon!

The fastest Flash Cards that could still be considered affordable are around 100 megabytes per second with the best at 160 megs per second. With dual cards you could stripe the writing and move 4 gigabytes from VRAM to Fast Flash in 15 seconds or less which on a technical basis for RAW uncompressed format is pretty good!

For Wavelet based JPEG-2000 images 10:1 to 30:1 compression rates, I will calculate a rate of less then 5 seconds to transfer 4 gigabytes to a fast Flash Card. If the SATA interface option is true, then write speeds of 500+ megabytes per second would be possible so two or three seconds for four gigabytes of RAW images when using striped mode is all that would be needed in terms of write time. (i.e. two SATA drives writing at same time). JPEG-2000 compressed images would have an unlimited write time at 25 fps at 10:1 to 30:1 compression rates to SATA drives.

Striping images to dual cards? Have you ANY idea how a professional photographer works?
From what you say, without striping, shoot 1 second of 25 fps and it takes 15 seconds to write to the card? Either I misunderstand what you are talking about, or you have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to understanding that photographers actually need....

'pretty good' won't cut it.

So let me ask a simple question, 25 frames per second at 50MP per frame, 3 seconds shooting raw, requirement of a 60-frame buffer cleared within (for example) 5 seconds? (most people say with a CFast card the 1Dx2 is essentially unlimited shooting capacity.
 
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Don Haines

Beware of cats with laser eyes!
Jun 4, 2012
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neuroanatomist said:
Fleetie said:
Surely that should be 296,681,472 bytes per frame, i.e. a factor of 2 more than you claim?
Which in turn gives 6.9GB (GiB) per second?

Surely you're not questioning his DECADES of experience and copious EXPERTISE in this subject matter? ;)
Now now..... play nice....

besides, aren't we talking
about 50 FPS anyway?

That gives us 13.8GB
of data per second so
it would be quite
unreasonable to expect
on-the-fly compression
of the raw files.

A fast memory card
will let you store about
0.16GB per second,
but you can stripe
them to improve
throughput so having
eight of them would
allow you to store the
images at 1.28GB per
second, and if you had
ninety of them you
could keep up with a
full speed burst.

Of course, nobody is
going to put 90 memory
cards into a camera,
but eight is practical.
when it is time to move
the images to your
computer, just put a
card into the reader
and download the files,
then another card, and
another, and another
until the eight cards are
read, and then run a
program to re-assemble
the images, and off you
go!
 
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Fleetie said:
8192h x 6036v pixels = 49,446,912 pixels at 48 bits per pixel
(16 bits per RGB/YCbCr colour channel)= 148,340,736 bytes per frame x 25 fps = 3,708,518,400 bytes per second
or about 3.7 Gigabytes per second RAW.


Surely that should be 296,681,472 bytes per frame, i.e. a factor of 2 more than you claim?
Which in turn gives 6.9GB (GiB) per second?

===

Ooops! You Are Correct! Mea Culpa!

For some DUMB REASON I gave the 24 bit colour (i.e. 3 bytes per pixel) value rather than the 6 bytes per pixel value. I will let the above message stand as is to allow for corrections by others SO HERE IS THE CHANGED MATH:

8192h x 6036v pixels at 16 bits (2 bytes) per colour channel = 48 bit colour
or 6 bytes per pixel = 49,446,912 pixels (48 bits per pixel)

= 296,681,472 bytes per frame x 25 fps

= 7,417,036,800 bytes per second or 7.4 gigabytes per second

which means 8 gigabytes of VRAM (about 140 euros) would be needed to store 1 second of burst rate RAW format images. So, for the typical 3 second burst that means 24 gigabytes or about 420 euros worth of VRAM which is a bit suspect but still technically doable for Medium Format RAW image writing.

For image writing speed at 160 megabytes per second for the FASTEST Flash Cards, let us assume that a dual fast card using interleaved writing of whole images will be used where Image #1 goes to Card Slots #1 and Image #2 goes to Card Slot #2 at the same time. So for 3 seconds of imagery (75 RAW photos at 25 fps) at 160 megs/second it would take 75 seconds to dump to two fast flash cards.

YES! I concede that sounds a bit ridiculous there!

Hmmm....at 500 megabytes per second dual SATA SSD drives for 24 gigabytes worth (75 raw images - 3 Seconds of RAW format burst rate imagery) the write time would be about 24 seconds for a dual SATA SSD drive system.

For JPEG-2000 4:4:4 48-bit colour Wavelet compressed images at 10:1 compression we would be looking at less than three seconds to dump 75 images (3 seconds at 25 fps) to the dual SATA SSD!!! That looks doable!

OK! I ALSO CONCEDE this is starting looking a bit more and more ridiculous...but who knows...maybe someone at Canon could have thought up something to counter the math I have calculated so far.

Comments and Flames here on in are all welcome!
 
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