Gallery: The Wildest, Most Futuristic Tech From Canon's Photo Expo
01Cinema EOS System 8K Camera
This upcoming video camera's full-frame CMOS sensor can capture 8K video at 60fps, and the video quality is mind-boggling. Each frame of a full HD video is around two megapixels. Each frame of a 4K video is around eight megapixels. Each frame of an 8K video is around 32 megapixels, but this in-development 8K camera captures 35-megapixel frames just to be safe. Watching its 8K footage on one of Canon’s 8K reference monitors---another technology that’s still in development---was indistinguishable from looking at real-world objects. Everything is so sharp and colorful, your brain may have trouble believing they are digital images.
028K HDR Video
The detail you can see in an 8K video clip is astounding, and it never breaks down: Canon had magnifying glasses placed near its prototype 8K reference monitors so you could inspect them up close---without ever seeing a pixel. These prototype HDR 8K displays took the image quality to even higher heights. Thanks to a backlight system that pumps out 2,000 nits---about 10 times the brightness of your average TV---the brights can get incredibly bright. And thanks to a superpowered local-dimming system, the darks still stay dark. The result is incredible color gamut and contrast to go along with all those extra pixels.
03An Even Smarter Home
Canon also showed off its vision of the way our homes and furniture will interact with devices in the coming years. In the coolest part of the demo, placing a digital camera on a touch-sensitive table automatically “spread” the images out in digital form on the table. From there, you could auto-size and print images simply by placing a picture frame on top of them. And placing certain objects on the table would automatically bring up pictures they appeared in.
04Printable Textures
Forging Vermeers has never been easier. Canon showcased its “material appearance image-processing technology” at the show, which can analyze the texture of a surface from a scan, then print that grain and finish along with the image itself. The process requires special paper, as well as UV-curable inks. This textured piece of art is perhaps the most subtle example of the technology; Canon also displayed printable materials that mimicked the feel of denim, metal, and wicker.
05Vertigo-Inducing Prints
To flex the power of its massive industrial printers, Canon had a few optical illusions set up around the show floor. In one, a massive print-out of an airplane was displayed in a giant window box; you really had to get up close to it to realize it was just a 2D image. In this one, a bird’s eye view of a New York cityscape was embedded in the floor. The show was on the ground level, but the effect made you feel like you were overlooking a balcony several dozen stories up.
06Prototype 250-megapixel sensor
Tucked inside this scientific-looking box is an APS-H sensor---bigger than APS-C, but smaller than a full-frame imager---that captures 19,580x12,600 images. That’s 250 megapixels, video that’s 30 times the resolution of 4K, and each RAW frame runs about 500MB in size. In a demo of the sensor’s capabilities, Canon showed a video in which you could enlarge a small portion of the screen and read lettering on the side of a building more than nine miles away. The resolution isn’t the only stunning thing, as the sensor shuttles image data off the chip at high speeds---an important skill for recording five 250-megapixel images per second.
07Mixed Reality Training
Virtual reality and augmented reality are normally associated with gaming and entertainment, but Canon already has a headset on the market for interactive training and business applications. Using a mixture of CGI, positional tracking (via a weird little Christmas-tree-like device on the top of the headset), and cameras on the outside of the mask, the MREAL system lets you interact with both virtual and real objects at the same time. When you wear the headset, computer-generated overlays transform your surroundings, but you can still see people and other objects from the real world.
Canon08120-Megapixel Stills on an 4K Reference Monitor
The prototype 120-megapixel DSLR Canon had on display at the show is built around an APS-H sensor and looks a lot like a finalized product; it’s designed to be used with the company’s existing EF lenses. But its output is like nothing you’ve seen before, especially when you view its photos on one of Canon’s 4K reference monitors. “Tack-sharp” doesn’t do it justice, and that sky-high resolution means you can crop in for days and still see stunning detail. With a file size of around 250MB per RAW image, you’re going to need a roomier card.
09A Camera With ISO 4 Million
Waaaay on the other side of the resolution divide is the Canon ME30F-SH, a boxy two-megapixel video camera that shoots 1080p video with its full-frame sensor. None of that is impressive, but this is: The camera has a maximum ISO of 4,000,000. At the show, Canon had a setup where the camera was pointed at a colorful scene with no available light. The ME30F-SH was still able to capture perfectly visible footage with incredible color accuracy. It’s not a prototype, either: The ME30F-SH will be available in December for a mere $30,000.
