OT: 120 MP sensor!

Trying to understand that makes my brain ache!
http://dpreview.com/news/1008/10082410canon120mpsensor.asp

Holy crap! This is an exciting time to be a photographer. If something like this ever becomes reality I'm guessing it will require a new line of super high resolution, super high cost lenses.

That is truly incredible.. It will be interesting to see if this pans out to consumer use. The main issue I see is a file size of an image with that kind of resolution would itself require a powerhouse computer to process. Can you imagine the photoshop file sizes after dropping 5-10 layers on that image? Not to mention the lenses as Brett mentions above, or even the CF cards and transfer rates to get images of that size quickly offloaded. The reality is that the rest of the technology has to advance sufficiently to support something like this, at least for consumer purposes.

This technology is a little ridiculous for consumer/professional applications, but it is used widely in remote sensing cameras. While it would be sweet to have it in the Canon 1D MarkMCXVII, I don't think working with ~350mb RAW files would be much fun. You'd have to have at least a 16 or 32Gb CF card for a days' work, then a few Tb's at home to store that data. Ah, I can see the future.... its bright

Adding to what Christopher is saying, if you thought Canon's lenses were at or beyond their resolution capabilities before, what would 120mp of detail from an inferior lens look like? But if this means, say, a 50mp full-frame sensor is right around the corner, that'd be pretty cool.

Another thing: With a 120mp sensor, couldn't you just slap a 16-35 (or Nikon 14-24 ) on the camera and, if you need telephoto, just crop in to the image?

In 1983 they told us a 20mb hard drive was all we would ever need!!!

In 1983 they told us a 20mb hard drive was all we would ever need!!!

I was thinking something very similar. Fast forward down the road and we will be saying 120mp, that's what my cell phone has.

Another thing: With a 120mp sensor, couldn't you just slap a 16-35 (or Nikon 14-24 ) on the camera and, if you need telephoto, just crop in to the image?

Sort of, but it wouldn't look very sharp depending on how far in you went. Then again.. 120mp..

I highly doubt this will ever show up in a DSLR type camera. I could be wrong, but I must say, 20 mp is more than enough horsepower these days. Furthermore, compact camera maunfacturers are reducing the pixel density and going with larger photopoints to reduce noise. For an APSH sensor to have 120 million pixels would be a little over 12,000ppi.

I see two main problems with a 120 meg sensor. First off, noise would probably be horrible; but this may be fixable. Cameras now have noise filtration, chromatic aberation fixes, distorsion correction and vignetting correction. Taking the noise out of a 120meg sensor might just require a next generation of noise reduction. The bigger problem might be lens resolution. Only a couple of Canon's current lenses are capable of resolving even the 21 meg sensors available at this time - and then only at one or two f-stops. Ther CIA or the military might have the budget for the million dollar lenses this sensor would take, but I'm a little short this month. Best we can hope for is a computer solution to take care of the resolution fix. They have managed to fix many of the problems lenses have with the computer so maybe this will be possble as well.
As far a storage capacity, I'm sure that will evolve as needed. I was just doing reasearch the other day and they are talking about computer memory based on the subatomic principle of eletron spin. This would make a computer trillions of times smaller and faster than we now have - with trillions of times the amount of memory. It is hard to even imaging what cameras will be like in 10 or 20 years. That 120 meg phone camera might be including free in cereal boxes 50 years from now.

I don't mind having 120MP-200MP digital images to work from. It takes a while to apply changes but the prints are stellar.

That said, I agree that I don't think Canon has many lenses capable of resolving at this level. And since they haven't brought out the 50MP sensor in production, I don't see them bringing this one out any time soon either.

Quantum computing is where it's at...Moore's law only has so much life left.

This makes me wonder, what measurement comes after Terabyte? I think they call it a Petabyte? I think that is what we would need for storage in the nest 5 years.