Image sensors are an integral part of a smartphone. We are living in an age where we have several image senors on our phones. It is not uncommon to see a phone in 2020 having 4 or more image sensors of different types that are used for imaging purposes.
Samsung is a leader in the electronics game and they also make image sensor. ISOCELL is the brand name and their latest one is the 108MP sensor found on the Galaxy S20 ultra. If you thought that 108MP was the limit, well think again. Samsung is aiming for bigger numbers.
Samsung’s Head of Sensor Business, Youngin Park said that Samsung is aiming for a 600MP sensor in the future. “We are determined to open up endless possibilities in pixel technologies that might even deliver image sensors that can capture more detail than the human eye,” he said in the post.
They are aiming for a small pixel high resolutions sensor like the one we saw with the 108MP ISOCELL sensor on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. The S20 Ultra has a 108MP sensor with 0.8μm sized pixels and the 600MP variant might be of this nature. Having such tiny pixels is a problem since it can result in fuzzy photos and let in less light per pixel. They’ve countered this by binning pixels, where in the case of the Ultra, they combined 9 adjacent pixels to make one superpixel.
Samsung wants to go beyond smartphones with their image sensors. They want to expand to autonomous vehicles, Internet of Things devices and drones. I’m curious to see this eventual 600MP sensor in the future and how practical it will be.
