Afaik, normal camera sensors acquire the image row by row from top to bottom or vice versa. I forget. So if you are recording video and sweep the camera left to right youll see that vertical lines like telephone poles etc will be staggered (stair-stepped) and have rolling shutter. But with a global shutter the whole sensor is captured at once and not line by line so when you shoot video and pan the camera vertical lines look straight. You can get over this by having the top to bottom scanning time be super fast (and this i think varies from camera model to camera model) or all at once like this new sensor.

It’s important for video, maybe high speed flash photography too.

CMOS sensors use a “rolling shutter”, where the image is taken one line of pixels at a time across the sensor. For video of fast moving objects this can distort the appearance and motion significantly. If you’ve ever tried to take a video of a propeller plane engine you’ve probably seen this effect. It can also cause the entire image to wobble back and fourth like jello if the entire camera is moving rapidly or vibrating.

https://youtu.be/dNVtMmLlnoE @2:44

A global shutter would have all of the image lines captured at once, eliminating this problem and making any high-speed motion look better in general.

In addition to all the cool stuff the top comment who responded to you said, I think this also fixes issue with flash syncing. That is to say, sometimes if you try pushing your shutter speed too high on a camera with the other kind of sensors, flashes that come from things like speedlights could start producing strips of darkness in your image because the sensor is capturing part of the image before the flashes go off, then part of it when the flashes are actively going off. My understanding is that a global sensor would allow you to shoot at higher shutter speeds with speed flashes as long as the device you’re using to sync them to the camera is also fast enough to handle that fast of a shutter speed.

I know very little about digital photography (analogue photographer here) so I could be completely wrong, but that’s what I’m inferring based on what I do know.

It looks more like film, where the entire exposing surface is exposed at the same time. Global shutter sensors do the same, versus rolling shutter that does it line by line.

Canon has announced a new 19-megapixel, full-frame, global-shutter sensor that it says is ideal for capturing fast-moving subjects without distortion.