Thanks to an anonymous contact who sent us a datasheet on Sony's newest consumer grade CCD for digital still cameras. The ICX282 is the latest in a series of CCD sensors and is the direct progression from the ICX252 seen in many of this years 3 megapixel digital cameras. A leap in resolution and more interestingly the sensor's size has increased to 2/3" (11 mm diagonally), thus unit size (pixel size) is almost the same (3.4µm vs. 3.45µm).

The graph above shows the development of the ICX2xx series of Sony CCD's since late 1997, the ICX252 is the 3 megapixel CCD used in many of todays 3 megapixel digital cameras, this means next year we can probably expect to see not 4 megapixel but 5 megapixel digital cameras.. And with new optical systems to cope with the increased sensor size.

Sony ICX282 Specifications