Photography

Canon's new camera shoots color video in pitch black, from miles away

View 6 Images
Canon's new MS-500 puts the company's groundbreaking new ultra-sensitive SPAD sensor into a commercial video camera
Canon
Canon's new MS-500 puts the company's groundbreaking new ultra-sensitive SPAD sensor into a commercial video camera
Canon
Attach this monstrous 45x zoom broadcast lens, and you can shoot video from "several tens of kilometres away" in near-total darkness
Canon
SPAD sensors record the arrival of every individual photon, complete with exactly when it arrived – making them very handy 3D time-of-flight sensors
Canon
Canon's new 3.2-megapixel, 1” Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) sensor
Canon
The back panel of the MS-500 camera: all business
Canon
A thumbnail-sized photo of a boat on a lake with lights on is the best sample image Canon has deigned to provide at this stage
Canon
View gallery - 6 images

Canon has wrapped its experimental ultra-high sensitivity Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) sensor up into a world-first commercial product. The new MS-500 accepts ultra-telephoto broadcast lenses, and can shoot color video on a moonless night.

As the name suggests, these SPAD sensors effectively count individual photons – the tiniest possible quanta of light – noting down the precise moment when they hit the pixel array, as opposed to doing what a regular CMOS camera sensor does, and outputting the total amount of light received over a given amount of time. The "avalanche" part refers to an amplifying effect of sorts; when a pixel detects a photon, it releases an electron, and that electron itself, at high speed and high voltage, can shake other electrons loose as it goes.

SPAD sensors record the arrival of every individual photon, complete with exactly when it arrived – making them very handy 3D time-of-flight sensors
Canon

What you end up with is a sensor with an insane level of sensitivity in low light, almost like a high-speed Geiger-counter for photons. You can use that in a number of ways; Canon, for its part, used an experimental 1-megapixel version of this thing to build a 24,000-fps camera capable of producing usable images at shutter speeds in the tens of trillionths of a second.

How quick is that? Quick enough to freeze light itself in motion. Check out the video below, which shows the movement of a single pulse of laser light, as it moves through smoke, bouncing off mirrors in a three-dimensional setup.

SPAD sensors themselves are not new; they've been used broadly for more than 50 years – most notably, in applications like LiDAR, 3D time-of-flight (ToF) imaging and PET scanning, where their incredible speed gives them the ability to accurately record exactly when a photon arrived, allowing these devices to create 3D models of the world.

What is new is that Canon has developed a groundbreaking 13.2 x 9.9 mm, 3.2-megapixel, ultra-high sensitivity SPAD sensor and built a commercial, interchangeable-lens video camera system around it.

The back panel of the MS-500 camera: all business
Canon

Canon says the new MS-500, announced yesterday, is the world's first camera of its kind, and the highest pixel-count SPAD sensor ever offered for sale, with a resolution higher than 1080p. It debuts a new architecture that Canon claims gives it exceptional performance, even among SPAD sensors, in temporal resolution, low noise and near-infrared light spectrum sensitivity.

It's capable of capturing video in illumination levels as low as 0.001 lux – we're talking starlight in the middle of a moonless night – "as though viewing with the naked eye in well-lit environments" – and it's also capable of processing data in somewhere around 100 trillionths of a second, which Canon says will allow it "to capture objects moving at high speeds including photons."

The MS-500 camera itself looks like somewhat of a brick house, and with a built-in B4 bayonet lens mount, it's compatible with a wide range of 2/3 inch broadcast lenses, including the brutally-named CJ45ex13.6B IASE-V H, which offers a 45x zoom ratio, with a telephoto reach up to 1,224 mm. Canon says this lets you film subjects up to a remarkable "several tens of kilometers away."

Attach this monstrous 45x zoom broadcast lens, and you can shoot video from "several tens of kilometres away" in near-total darkness
Canon

At an estimated retail price of US$25,200 (plus nearly $100K more for that monster lens), it's certainly not pitched at the consumer level. Indeed, Canon is pitching it for "areas with extremely high-security levels, such as seaports, public infrastructure facilities, and national borders, [where] high-precision monitoring systems are required to surveil targets both day and night accurately."

But the sensor technology itself could prove to be a breakthrough in medical imaging, 3D capture, VR/AR and autonomous cars and robotics. Its capabilities with near-infrared spectrum light, for example, could give it superhuman vision and object detection capabilities in fog, mist and bucketing rain.

Very cool stuff – although Canon has provided exactly zero sample video footage at this stage, which strikes us as an absolute facepalm of a PR blunder. In the meanwhile, there's ... this?

A thumbnail-sized photo of a boat on a lake with lights on is the best sample image Canon has deigned to provide at this stage
Canon

Source: Canon

View gallery - 6 images
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
5 comments
Ranscapture
I’m gonna use that for my pitch black onlyfans channel.
anthony88
The ultimate surveillance camera. These are going to fly out of Canon's production facility as fast as they can produce them. Meanwhile, some little companies will be producing incognito weatherproof and theft-proof housings, and poles to mount these cameras from.
Brian M
Like you - Total impressed, especially the video of the laser pulse, until the fishing boat 'PR blunder' photograph
Why? My lowly Nikon could do that!
Rocky Stefano
Imagine the types of sensors developed for the military and aerospace that resulted in this "retail" level sensor. The military has likely had that capability for 15 years
*Joe*
There's sample video footage from Canon's YouTube channel in this longer version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8CJjgrkWrM