Megapixel Bravado

Samsung’s 108-megapixel sensor sparks another imaging arms race

On Monday, South Korean tech giant Samsung, in partnership with Chinese handset maker Xiaomi, launched a 108-megapixel mobile camera sensor called Samsung Isocell Bright HMX. With this latest move, the megapixel arms race, which appeared to have abated, could be back again in full force. For perspective, the main imaging sensor in current smartphones typically provides 12 to 16 megapixels.

The Isocell Bright HMX is the first mobile image sensor in the industry to go beyond 100 million pixels and Samsung claims it offers “a resolution equivalent to that of a high-end DSLR camera”.

This innovation represents another jump in the resolution of mobile cameras this year, after phones such as the Honor 20 Pro and OnePlus 7 Pro employed Sony’s 48-megapixel IMX 586 sensor.

Samsung’s Bright HMX should have a major advantage in overall image quality: the bigger the sensor, the more light it can gather. Furthermore, it uses pixel-binning, a technique that merges four adjacent photo pixels into one big pixel. By merging nearby pixels, the sensor’s resolution gets reduced by 75% from 108 to 27 megapixels. This is still more than twice the resolution of high-end phones like Apple’s iPhone XS and Samsung’s Galaxy S10.

The sensor also supports video recording with full field of view at resolutions of up to 6K at 30 frames per second.

Samsung has developed the new imaging sensor in partnership with Xiaomi. Notably, the announcement comes at a time when Xiaomi revealed that it would launch a Redmi phone with a 64-megapixel camera in the final quarter of 2019, which will be powered by Samsung’s Isocell Bright GW1 mobile image sensor unveiled in May. In addition, Xiaomi has also announced that it would soon introduce a smartphone equipped with a 100-megapixel lens. The smartphone is expected to be the successor to its Mi Mix 3 and is likely to feature the newly announced Samsung image sensor.

With smartphones increasingly looking alike, smartphone makers have turned to imaging as a main selling point for their devices, using megapixels as a differentiator in their marketing. Until recently, 48 megapixels was the holy grail, but this could change with these announcements. A large megapixel count alone doesn’t guarantee great photos and Samsung is addressing that with a large sensor that processes the images.

Samsung is expected to start mass production of the Isocell Bright HMX sensor later in August 2019.