Yikes: Canon makes a 250 megapixel sensor

So you think your 20 megapixel phone is pretty spesh, and your 50 megapixel DSLR is amazeballs? Well Canon has developed a 250 megapixel sensor for a digital camera. How about them apples?

This year, it’s almost as if Canon is on a quest to blow our eyelids off with impressive feats, because it’s been barely over a month since the company found a way to make our jaws drop and yet it’s doing it again.

In late July, Canon decided to show off a new camera designed to see in the dark, with an ISO rating go four million (4,000,000). Only a few cameras go higher than 102,500, and they’re already pretty impressive, so we were mighty impressed by Canon’s four million ISO video camera, and can’t wait to see some video out of it, but that’s not all the company has been cooking up this year.

Now it has a camera that practically ends any megapixel war, firing the last shot in case anyone was still fighting.

250.

That’s the number Canon is using for a new APS-H sensor, with this super special CMOS camera sensor rocking 250 megapixels.

canon-250mp-sensor-2015

To put that into realistic terms, that is a resolution size of 19580 x 12600, with Canon saying that this sensor sports the world’s highest number of pixels for a CMOS sensor smaller than a 35mm full-frame sensor.

A special type of camera has had to be developed to make use of this sensor, which Canon has said is so high a resolution, it could “capture images enabling the distinguishing of lettering on the side of an airplane flying at a distance of approximately 18 km from the shooting location”.

Over in video, the quality is already higher than every format cameras are currently shooting with, sitting at roughly 30 times that of 4K Ultra HD, and around 125 times that of Full HD (1920×1080).

Unfortunately, you won’t be getting this sensor this year, though Canon has said that the sensor technology could see the light of day in “the field of visual expression”, which for those playing along at home, technically means cameras. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait too long.