The quality of 1080p had barely been made film-like before being cast aside for 4K and now manufacturers are racing to make 8K a reality, which is in the region of 36MP, before 2018.
It seems the megapixel race has truly come to filmmaking.
Read moreWhy 8K will not eliminate the boundary between stills and video when it comes to technique
Panasonic froze image sensor research and development in 2011 and have only now resumed.
The company has committed $80m to revitalise their image sensors business in light of growing revenue from their imaging business as a whole and hot demand for sensors.
One of the goals of the $80m investment is the creation of an 8K sensor to be released in Panasonic cameras around 2018.
Read morePanasonic developing 8K sensor for consumer and broadcast cameras
Canon today issued an unusual development announcement for two upcoming cameras.
The first is a Cinema EOS C500 successor with 8K recording. The second is a 5DS style full frame DSLR featuring 120 megapixel resolution.
Read moreCanon announces development of 8K Cinema EOS camera and 120MP DSLR
Feast your eyes on this 9K image from Zeiss. Sony Alpha Rumors makes a good case for it being from the updated A7R II.
I’d say it has a good chance of being real and here’s why…
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/124732922[/vimeo]
Red have announced their latest sensor. It’s a full frame (Vista Vision) 40mm x 20mm CMOS capable of 8K (8192 x 4320). At that resolution the maximum frame rate is still an impressive 75FPS.
This is the current state of the art.
Japan’s national broadcast corporation NHK has developed a large CMOS 8K sensor for Super Hi Vision.
At 21.5mm x 12.1mm it is the size of Super 35mm when cropped to 16:9, and does 120fps at a resolution of 7680 x 4320.