TL;DR Samsung Semiconductor has announced the ISOCELL HP5 200MP camera sensor.
The company says this is the world’s first image sensor with ultra-tiny 0.5-micron pixels.
Smaller pixels are typically not a good thing, as it means reduced light intake and potentially worse images.
Samsung is still the only major camera sensor manufacturer offering 200MP sensors in the smartphone industry. These 200MP sensors are used by everyone from vivo and HONOR to Xiaomi and Samsung itself. Now, the company has announced a brand-new 200MP sensor, but I’m not sure if it’s actually better than or on par with current 200MP cameras.
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Samsung Semiconductor (spotted via SammyGuru) quietly announced the ISOCELL HP5 200MP camera sensor, which has a 1/1.56-inch sensor size. And the company makes quite a song and dance about how this is the “world’s first image sensor to feature pixels as small as 0.5 microns.” That’s not really something you want to brag about in the first place.
The size of a camera sensor’s pixels is a key factor when it comes to picture quality. Larger pixels can capture more light, and more light equals brighter, cleaner photos with less noise. So boasting that you’re the first to offer such super-tiny pixels seems like a strange claim at first glance. To use a crude analogy, it’s like a car manufacturer saying it has the world’s smallest sun roof.
No such thing as a free lunch? Samsung claims the ISOCELL HP5 has several technologies to help mitigate the move to smaller pixels and a smaller sensor size. The company says the sensor uses front deep trench isolation (FDTI) and dual vertical transfer gate (D-VTG) technologies to maximize the captured light. These aren’t new technologies, though; D-VTG has been used on previous 200MP sensors, while FDTI dates back years.
However, the camera sensor maker also says it’s using DTI Center Cut (DCC) technology. This tech “opens part of the trench among four photodiodes,” resulting in a claimed 150% increase in conversion gain and as much as 40% improvement in random noise. DCC tech should also improve autofocus performance, in conjunction with the existing super QPD autofocus.
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