Canon announced a 50 megapixel 1.6x crop size CMOS prototype sensor today:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/06/canons_50_megap.html

Pretty crazy!

James

Maybe it's time for a new T-shirt:

all you need is

4 / 6 / 8,2 / 10,2 / 12,8 / 16,7 / 50

megapixels

50 megapixel?!? That means I'll need a 10ghz chip to process it and for that chip I'll need liquid cooling. Still it'll be cool to snap a shot meant for 800mm with a 200mm and have pretty good detail.

This was discussed on Engadget about 2 months ago: http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/04/canon-c...-cmos-prototype

It's a 1.3 crop sensor, not 1.6. Why they would choose that sensor size for a prototype I'd like to know. It would also be interesting to see the IQ they can get out of that. I'd "settle" for 2 fps to get that if the IQ were good enough. ;-)

Good grief! This takes pixel envy to a whole other level!

Is Seacam starting to design a housing yet?

Thanks for the correction Craig. It figures that Wired didn't pick up on this until much too late...lol. The blurb on Engadget was from Jun 4th! I guess that's probably when the announcement was posted on the Nikkei

I'm pretty sure that all of these designers and fabricators have probably made prototypes like these just to see how far they can go. Like you said, 3.3 micron pixel pitch isn't beyond the pale. The small Sony sensors are using 2.5 or even less now.

But just imagine what a sensor like this would do to our diffraction limits, ugh!

James