Chipworks shines x-ray vision on Canon Rebel T4i

The folks over at Chipworks have been inside more electronic gadgetry than many of us have had hot suppers, and they've just served up another tasty morsel. At the end of last week, they posted the first details from their teardown of the Canon EOS Rebel T4i digital SLR.

This teardown is particularly interesting, because the Canon T4i debuts a brand-new CMOS image sensor with on-chip phase detection technology, and Chipworks gives us our very first look at Canon's phase detection pixels. These are used to allow phase detect autofocus during live view. It's a technique seen previously in Fujifilm's FinePix F300EXR and Z800EXR, followed by Nikon's 1-series cameras, but according to Chipworks, differs in that the pixels are liberally scattered around the sensor. This is likely done to avoid noticeable image quality defects; placing the sensors with a greater spread would leave smaller areas of the image to be interpolated from surrounding image pixels.

The Chipworks teardown also offers an interesting look at some of the T4i's other internals, including the mirror box and shutter assembly, vertically stacked DIGIC 5 image processor and SDRAM, and more. If you have more than a passing interest in Canon's camera design, you can purchase die photos, reports, and more... Read the article "Inside the Canon Rebel T4i DSLR" on the Chipworks blog for the full story.