GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Sigma’s new flagship SD1 SLR stands out from the flood of camera announcements at the Photokina show. Why? It is a monster, a crop-sensor camera with 46 megapixels crammed onto its imaging chip.

The trick here is that the sensor uses Sigma’s Foveon tech. This stacks red, green and blue-sensitive pixels on top of each other, allowing accurate color-capture at each pixel-site. Compare this with conventional sensors which pull color information from adjoining pixels and averaging it to work out the actual colors. Sigma’s method should give better color accuracy and sharper images.

Because of this stacking, though, Sigma’s pixel-counts are effectively one third of the claimed figure if you count actual dots on the photos. In the past, this has made Sigma’s specs look rather pathetic, with the claimed 15MP of its SD15 coming closer to 5MP. With this new 46MP behemoth Sigma is saying a big “screw you” to everyone else. Even 15MP sensor is great these days.

Elsewhere, the specs are fairly pedestrian. There are just 11 autofocus points and the 3-inch LCD has only 460,000 dots compared the the 900,000 found in any other flagship camera (including compacts). This is a pre-release, so many of the numbers are not yet available. Just what will the maximum ISO be, for example, or the price?

I’m pretty excited about getting my hands on one, though. If this thing has the ISO part licked, then those could be some sweet, sweet images it pumps out.

SD1 product page [Sigma. Warning: Flash]

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

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 2436mm. 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

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews