You remember the saying about being as dark as a black cat in a coal cellar? Well, it turns out Canon has made a sensor that can photograph it.
The new, super-sensitive CMOS sensor is fresh from Canon's labs, and measures 202 x 205mm. A 35mm film-frame (and its corresponding sensor) is 24×36mm. This makes the new C-MOnSter 40-times bigger than Canon's biggest sensor, the 21.1 MP model in the EOS-1Ds Mark III and EOS 5D Mark II. You can see both side-by-side in the above photograph.
To visualize this, imagine a foot-wide circle. This is the wafer from which the chip is cut. This new behemoth is just about the largest square that can be chopped from that wafer.
The chip is suitable for both stills and video, and needs just 1/100th the light of an equivalent stills camera sensor to make the same image. It is, in short, as sensitive to light as Marty McFly is sensitive to being called "chicken". If you could lift it, a camera with this lens would turn night to day and allow you to take high-speed action shots at night, by moonlight, even if it were cloudy.
It is of course unlikely that you or I will ever use a camera this big. The sensor is much more likely to find it's way into astronomy-related cameras or even super-hi-def commercial movie cameras. What it does mean for us is that the camera manufacturers are seriously investigating low-light, and that in turn means the end of crappy flash-photos taken on drunken nights out. Hooray for that.
Canon succeeds in developing world's largest CMOS image sensor, with ultra-high sensitivity [Canon]
Ironically tiny product photo: Canon
