Has Canon developed a new 21mp sensor for the Canon EOS R system? [CR1]

[Traveler]

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Did you notice that the older post about the 2/3” sensor mentioned two numbers of the DR?
HDR of 111dB (18 stops – quite high number, too), and
NDR of 79dB which are more realistic 13 stops.
Would it mean that the “real” DR of this new sensor would be also two stops higher, something around 15 stops?

 

[addola]

Did you notice that the older post about the 2/3” sensor mentioned two numbers of the DR?
HDR of 111dB (18 stops – quite high number, too), and
NDR of 79dB which are more realistic 13 stops.
Would it mean that the “real” DR of this new sensor would be also two stops higher, something around 15 stops?

I am a grad student, so I have access to the IEEE document for the 2/3" sensor. I can't share it for copyright concerns, but It seems that there are two modes: Multiple-Accumulation procedure and HDR procedure. The paper says: " As a result, the dynamic range increases from about 79 dB in 60 fps with the multiple-accumulation procedure to 111 dB in 60 fps for the HDR procedure. ".

I don't know what they mean by "multiple accumulation readout procedure", but it does sounds something similar to "stacked sensor"?

Who knows, but it will be huge if Canon put something like that into their product line.

 

[Traveler]

I am a grad student,...
...The paper says: " As a result, the dynamic range increases from about 79 dB in 60 fps with the multiple-accumulation procedure to 111 dB in 60 fps for the HDR procedure. ".

That’s what I read in the screenshots, too. But does it mean that the HDR mode is something that doesn’t have any disadvantages or can it be something as unusable as multiple shots?

 

[EOS 4 Life]

I am a grad student, so I have access to the IEEE document for the 2/3" sensor. I can't share it for copyright concerns, but It seems that there are two modes: Multiple-Accumulation procedure and HDR procedure. The paper says: " As a result, the dynamic range increases from about 79 dB in 60 fps with the multiple-accumulation procedure to 111 dB in 60 fps for the HDR procedure. ".

I don't know what they mean by "multiple accumulation readout procedure", but it does sounds something similar to "stacked sensor"?

Who knows, but it will be huge if Canon put something like that into their product line.

That does not sound like a stacked sensor.
HDR reads the sensor multiple times for each image frame.
My guess is that adding the signals from each readout together boosts the decibel amount.
I believe that is how it works with recorded sound so maybe recorded light works the same way.

 

[Kit.]

Global shutter will avoid banding when using flash, and allows much higher shutter speeds with flash.

In 2017, Canon published a research paper on that 2/3" sensor. It was published in an IEEE Journal, and titled "A 1.8e-rms Temporal Noise Over 110-dB-Dynamic Range 3.4 μm Pixel Pitch Global-Shutter CMOS Image Sensor With Dual-Gain Amplifiers SS-ADC, Light Guide Structure, and Multiple-Accumulation Shutter".

The rumors is very believable, but whether it is practical or ready for everyday use in a consumer product is another story.

You won't get such a DR with such a pixel pitch on a stills sensor (without multiple exposure artifacts), global shutter or not. Physically impossible with the current technology.

On a video sensor, interleaving the ISOs of the adjacent video frames, it's possible. But no "shutter speeds with flash", of course.

 

[EOS 4 Life]

You won't get such a DR with such a pixel pitch on a stills sensor (without multiple exposure artifacts), global shutter or not. Physically impossible with the current technology.

On a video sensor, interleaving the ISOs of the adjacent video frames, it's possible. But no "shutter speeds with flash", of course.

A global shutter would not eliminate HDR artifacts but it should greatly reduce them.
Combining entire frames in less challenging than combining individual lines.
HDR has more artifacts but it also has more detail.
Life is full of tradeoffs.

 

[HarryFilm]

Its based on a current (for sale) 2/3's, 5.5MP, 3.4um pixel, industrial high speed use (120fps), global shutter sensor. The pixel and sensor size suggest they could use this tech on MUCH higher consumer MP count applications.

I feel like this is more of a when than an if. Will it debut in the R1, or will it be pushed further down the road to the next high end body? The fact that Sony is going to be close behind, as these things tend to all get "found out" at the same time as accompanying tech becomes available to clear past hurdles tells me we'll see it sooner than later.

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I actually REMEMBER using 1 inch Plumbicon/Saticon Tube cameras that weighed 50 pounds (20 kg+) and more! We did 800 lines up to 1200 lines of vertical resolution. Quality-wise, if it wasn't for the blooming/streaks (i.e. blobs and streaks of white showing up near bright highlights), the quality of the tube cameras was actually BETTER than modern HDTV 1080p CMOS or CCD camera resolutions!

There are companies that STILL sell Saticon tubes (for nightvision use) that go as a high as 12000 lines of vertical resolution (i.e. a 3 inch Saticon-style tube!) used for BOTH Optical Daytime AND night-oriented photo-multiplier purposes so the image quality IS OUTSTANDING since the formulations of the phosphors is now so advanced that blooming and streaking is now so low that it is basically non-existent and can be NOW FULLY REMOVED using modern software/hardware DSP algorithms.

Not many CMOS imagers have 12,000 vertical lines of resolution so in certain cases tube-based image sensors are used because they work VERY WELL in specific environmental conditions such as Space or NO Light Areas! Horizontally, these newest tubes on the X-axis, return about 16000 pixels if sampled properly -- The Y axis is easier to sample than the X axis on a tube-based image sensor because of basic analogue circuitry issues due to analogue signal jitter, slew, rise-time problems! AND in some cases, the blooming and streaking of tube-based cameras IS a desired effect for capturing certain natural phenomenon better than any CMOS or CCD imaging system.

I have a few Plumbicon tubes from a 3/4 Inch camera system which I fire up once in a while! Still working GREAT since they were made in 1977!

V

 

[HarryFilm]

I think people put too much stock in the stacked sensor design. Canon proved there are other ways to skin that cat, even if they are not as efficient. As far as guessing Canon might bring a tech they've been selling for years, I don't think it was ever a big stretch to see this coming. I personally threw it on my wish list for the R1 months ago when the expected drop was 2022-23. Same as the uber mega pixel 5Ds style sensor and camera pending. Some of this stuff is very obvious when you look at the past development trends.

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There IS another image sensor technology out there beyond CMOS, CCD or even Tubes! It's on the patent and trade secret books of a certain series of firms here in Canada, USA, Europe and Japan and you COULD kinda call it a Double-Stacked sensor since it has BOTH onboard DSP/CPU circuitry AND the individual Red Green and Blue sensitive substrates NO LONGER EXIST like on CMOS imaging systems, but are rather MERGED into a single photosite multi-photon stream frequency-sensing mechanism. I would say it's WAAAAAY BEYOND Sigma's Foveon technology and has the advantage of NOT requiring the very-hard-to-manufacture multiple photosensitive substrates stacked one-on-top-of-each-other like Sigma Foveon needs!

That new technology is being perfected now by multiple boutique companies and SHOULD be on the market within five years. Because of the TYPE of electrical micro-circuitry it is, it's BASE DSP sample size is almost always set to 64-bits wide per colour channel and usually set to output a 32 bit Nyquist re-sampled bitwise value per RGB channel which can then can be truncated/rounded down to 16-bits, 14-bits 12-bits, 10-bits or 8-bits per colour channel with minimal processing time.

Soooooo, Sony, Philips, Canon, Teledyne-Dalsa, ON, NEC, etc are NOT the only games in town for high resolution image sensing technology -- There are some BOUTIQUE image sensor design and manufacturing houses that build VERY HIGH END imaging solutions that go WAAAAY beyond consumer technology!

Many in that circle ARE indicating that consumer-level applications WILL be entertained because the manufacturing costs can be NOW lowered enough to make it viable for this select group to apply these NEW imaging technologies to the broader consumer market segments. It also helps that some of the NEWER image sensing technologies have MUCH higher resolutions AND MUCH higher dynamic range than contemporary CMOS camera sensors so the BASE advantage makes it an obvious choice to start impinging upon the BIG BOYS of CMOS imaging (i.e. Sony, Canon, etc!).

V

 

[HarryFilm]

Agreed, of course. I agree Arm's not a B2C company like Canon (or at least, Canon's EF and RF lines of cameras). Still, B2B, B2C, that's not really the core of my point. My point is that ARM designs stuff they can't manufacture. Apple designs stuff they can't manufacture. My personal work history involves Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Hitachi, all MAKERS of PALs, nonetheless designing quite a few PALs they didn't have the capability to make and thus outsourcing their manufacture to Motorola via my old firm Omron.

In fact you'd probably have a hard time finding a firm the size of Canon that DOES manufacture literally everything they design.

And yet while Canon's described a certain sensor in detail in papers, and we now have leaks of the coming manufacture of something fitting the papers' description... nonetheless the website owner is telling us that because he personally doesn't know that Canon has facilities to manufacture this part, therefore it is absolutely utterly impossible that the part is the part described in the paper. And insulting me for even suggesting it.

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Since we actually DO HAVE CMOS and GaAs substrate manufacturing capability AND that the WORLD'S LARGEST ONE-PIECE CMOS SENSOR at 131,072 by 131,072 pixels (64-bit RGBA colour) on the world's LARGEST single-slab of etched 400 mm silicon was done RIGHT HERE in Vancouver, Canada, I think I can probably make a valid comment that Omron, Canon, Philips or ON Semiconductor DO HAVE the capability to manufacture whatever TYPES of image sensors they want AT THE SAME LEVEL SONY CAN if they put their minds and dollars to the job!

Anyways, Canon has done a 440 megapixel chip the size of a paper sheet for Space/Satellite purposes and I SAW THAT ONE PERSONALLY! Canon also ALREADY HAS 120 megapixel APS-H size sensors and has more than a few 50/60 megapixel and 80 megapixel sensors so they can do almost everything at scale because they are such a large size firm (Market Cap of 18 Billion USD with revenue of 37 Billion USD!), while we have barely hit above a billion dollars only in recent years and make maybe ten of those super-big 400mm sensors per year!

Canon and others can MATCH Sony's CMOS imaging prowess but they NEED to be hungry for market share. Canon is definitely getting BETTER but I REALLY THINK they need to start concentrating on LARGE SENSOR smartphones with 2/3rds inch, 1 inch and APS-C DCI 4K and DCI 8K resolution image sensors for stills AND video. THAT will save their bacon from Sony's onslaught of upcoming high resolution CMOS image sensors which WILL include new large 50 megapixel+ sensors for upcoming super-smartphones !!!

We shall see soon enough!

V

 

[x4dow]

120fps? How long does it take to fill up a 2TB CFexpress card?

120fps sensor = 120p video

 

[magarity]

righto.. so the 45Mm R5 would have to make it with 5 frames per second limit or some such according to your logic? it's a 20 fps capable camera.
again, you are incorrect, 20 MP is not a tech limitation but rather a designation at this stage.

I thought it obvious I was making up numbers - the point being that increasing frame rate requires increasing processing from the chips supporting the sensor. Is that incorrect?

 

[addola]

You won't get such a DR with such a pixel pitch on a stills sensor (without multiple exposure artifacts), global shutter or not. Physically impossible with the current technology.

On a video sensor, interleaving the ISOs of the adjacent video frames, it's possible. But no "shutter speeds with flash", of course.

That makes sense! The paper did mention that the with HDR procedure, motion blur might occur, stating that it is useful for "static and slow moving objects"

 

[y2kunals]

I don't know about these being specs for an R1. I think that camera will be more about stills than video (although still powerful video), but 21mp with global shutter seems more like an R5 Part 2 OR maybe even a new line of straight video focused mirrorless (without going to Cinema)

 

[futzy]

120fps? How long does it take to fill up a 2TB CFexpress card?

Around 595 seconds it’s 21mpix only - raw files are around 27-28Mb.

 

[jvillain]

120fps? How long does it take to fill up a 2TB CFexpress card?

I can give you a funny story. Back when I first got my BMPCC 6K I went to shoot a sun set time lapse, but when I got to the beach it was so bright I couldnt see any thing on the screen even with the lens hood and the monitor cranked so I pressed what I thought was my 6K every 4 sec preset. What it turned out to be was my 2.8K @120fps preset. It ran for almost 4 hours with out me noticing and finished filling my 1TB T5 about 4mins before I intendd to stop but we were well into blue hour so it was fine. I didn't notice until I got it home. I was able to drag it into resolve and render it down to the speed that I intended. Took a couple of hours to render though.

 

[highdesertmesa]

This is great news for the R6 Mark II

 

[SecureGSM]

I thought it obvious I was making up numbers - the point being that increasing frame rate requires increasing processing from the chips supporting the sensor. Is that incorrect?

partially correct. My point is thought that throughput has increased to the point where 100Mp sensor at 9 FPS is no longer an issue. In your original post you said: 20Mp tech in camera is like 3,.5Ghz in computers.

Has Canon developed a new 21mp sensor for the Canon EOS R system? [CR1]

Canon Watch is reporting that Canon has developed a new 21mp full-frame sensor and suggests we may see it in an upcoming EOS R camera. New sensor specifications: 21MP full-frame sensor (6.4um) Global shutter 120dB dynamic range (This translates to 20stops of dynamic range) 120...

www.canonrumors.com

I explained that 20Mp is no longer a limitation from a throughput point of view.

larger files in a High Megapixel camera can be an issue when too many and and too large.