Point taken—was just rounding out the benefits a bit.
I actually might be totally wrong on my understanding of how this works. I thought both methods (binning and read depth) affected performance (thermal and read speed)
With depth, the way I've always thought about it was in terms of math It's easier to add up a lot of low precision numbers, than a few high precision numbers:
300+200+100+200 is faster to add than
683+539
Likewise, you can read 45 megapixels at 10, 12 or 14 bits. It takes the sensor less time to amplify, do the ADC at a lower precision, increasing read speed.
With binning, even though you've got to deal with photons hitting every pixel, the way a CMOS sensor reads you can do a computationally cheap summing of values, before ADC. If you're summing 4 values, that's 1/4 the ADC that needs to be done. As to demosiacing, my understanding is that binned photo sites necessarily need to be *adjacent* so you can bin the 4 red pixels together and then de-mosaic.
The R5 sensor appears to be be able to do:
- Standard/Mechanical - 9fps @ 14bit
- H+ Mode - Mechanical - 12fps @ 13 bit
- Electronic - 20fps @ 12 bit
- DCI Crop - 30fps @ 12 bit
- DCI Crop - 60fps @ 10bit (is this a binned mode?)
- Binned - up to 120fps @ 10bit
So, it appears based off the modes canon has published* both sampling and depth play a part in speed. I'm a designer who reads camera forums for fun, so I'm a nerd about this stuff, but by no means an expert. If anyone has an idiot's guide to this I would love to be pointed to it.
*
https://www.canon-europe.com/cameras/eos-r5/specifications/