There is something a little curious about the specs for the sensor in the FS700:
| Imager | Exmor Super35 CMOS sensor |
| Number of pixels | Total pixels approx. 11.6M Effective pixels in movie shooting (16:9) approx. 8.3M Effective pixels in still picture shooting (16:9) approx. 8.4M (3:2) approx. 7.1M |
Why create a sensor with 11.6 million pixels and then use only 8.3M? It is normal to have some extra pixels that are used for setting black levels etc, but this is a massive difference between the number of actual pixels on the sensor and the number that are used to create the pictures. Where are all the un-used pixels? Given that this is a Super 35mm sensor, the active area used for video is APS-C ish sized, so it’s quite a big sensor already. What would you put a near full frame 35mm 11.6 MP sensor in these days? That’s a low pixel count for a modern large sensor DSLR or stills camera, even the compact NEX7 stills camera has 24MP. If (and this is just random speculation) the FS700 is taking an 8.3MP window out of the middle of the sensor, that makes it a pretty big chip. Another thought is that the FS700 does read the full height and width of the sensor but then uses some pixel skipping only actually reading 8.3MP, but why do that? In stills mode the camera only uses 8.4MP yet with so many extra pixels you could get higher resolution stills. So… why 11.6 MP and what else was this sensor designed for?