Sony has published the specifications for six new full-frame sensors, including multiple stacked sensors and a 15MP sensor that uses Sony´s Quad Bayer design found in a few of its smartphone image sensors. As always, these are basic spec documents aimed at would-be buyers of the chips, suggesting that all these technologies are available to customers outside Sony.
Below is a gallery of the spec sheets with a breakdown of the sensors following:
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Let´s start with the IMX521CQR: a new 15MP Quad Bayer sensor. This sensor appears to be a variant of the 61MP sensor inside the a7R IV but with Sony´s Quad Bayer color filter pattern in front of it. What´s interesting about this particular sensor is that Sony is calling it a 15MP sensor instead of 61MP; a very different approach to its marketing around the IMX586 smartphone sensor, which it calls a 48MP Quad Bayer sensor, despite its 12MP output. This isn´t the first Quad Bayer sensor outside of smartphones that Sony has developed either. Its IMX299CJK sensor is more or less a Quad Bayer version of the sensor inside the Panasonic GH5S.
The spec sheet suggests the sensor can be read as a series of large pixels or be treated so that alternate rows cut off after different exposures (or with different amounts of gain) to provide HDR images. This is conceptually very similar to the SR and DR modes of Fujifilm`s Super CCD EXR technology. The possibility exists that Sony doesn`t provide customers with the processing know-how that it uses to reconstruct a 61MP image, which may be why the chip is described as only offering 15MP.
Another interesting chip is the IMX311AQK (48.97MP). It`s a stacked CMOS chip that uses a 45-degree pixel array. Not many details are given, but it sounds a lot like an idea Fujifilm flirted with twe ...
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