Svenler's Fashion & Commercial Photography Blog

Canon's 120 MP sensor

As Canon mentions in their latest press release, they just developed a 120 megapixel APS-H-size CMOS sensor that is also capable of HD video. The sensor is 29.2 x 20.2 mm big and has a resolution of 13,280 x 9,184 pixels. According to Canon, the images from this sensor “maintain higher levels of definition and clarity than ever before” even when cropped or magnified. For some people, this sounds very impressive, while other people show their technophobe side by condemning this new development. At first glance, it surely sounds like a giant leap forward in terms of megapixel, but when taking a closer look, it is just an expectable development. Some people are afraid that they will not be able to process such large files with their computers for at least ten years, but in reality many of us are already using files this large or even larger. Last year I did a panorama image that consisted of over a dozen 21 megapixel files, yielding a final file that was approximately 200 megapixel. While it sure slowed my computer down much more than a 10 megapixel file, it was far and away from rendering my machine useless. Other concerns are that printers and lenses would not be able to take advantage of such resolution, but I can assure you that all current lenses and almost all printers will have no problem using files of such a resolution. Many commercial photographers already use cameras that have a resolution of 60 megapixel without problem.

While I would personally rather see a greater dynamic range and better image quality, I think that there will be numerous applications for a sensor with such resolution or higher. Sadly, Canon has not published an image file taken with that sensor yet, so there is really no telling if they managed to retain a good image despite the high pixel density. In any case, it will probably take some time for this sensor or a variation of it to be marketable and I am still quite happy with my 10 megapixel sensor.