The boldest piece of Sony’s sensor narrative is about size. On the heels of the Super35mm-sized single CMOS sensor the compnay developed for the F3, Sony has announced another CMOS single-sensor milestone: Its newest CineAlta camera featuring an 8K x 2K chip. That gives the new 8K CMOS inside a total pixel count of 20.4 million pixels, far more than the roughly 8.8 million pixels of the current 4K x 2K sensors in other existing cameras on the market. The new sensor size obviously also brings with it higher color reproduction and resolution than can be captured by those other 4K sensors. But don’t confuse sensor size, pixel density and resolution with the recording format. The images are still recorded and output in 16-bit RAW 4K (16:8:8). During our demo at Sony’s Atsugi Technology Center in a suburb of Tokyo, however, those images were noticeably crisper, brighter and cleaner as a result of the extra pixels. Blacks were deep and rich, too. No shades of gray here, though if you were shooting a mountain climber against a textured, marbled slab of granite, this imager would certainly pick up every bit of uncompressed detail. I’m told the camera will shoot from 1 through 72 fps. Crank that up to a High Frame Rate mode and you can go all the way up to 120 fps.

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