The years of most smartphone manufacturers using Sony sensors for the camera setups are well and truly coming to an end. Samsung has taken up the mantle of premium sensor provider, with their 108-megapixel camera pushing the limits. It doesn’t seem like Samsung is anywhere close to done with pixel pushing, with plans of a 600-megapixel camera sensor.
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Samsung’s Head of Sensor Business, Yongin Park, has laid out the company’s ambitious plans in a new blog post. They are already planning some massive enhancements to their manufacturing processes, and Park discusses the major obstacles as well.
According to Park: “In order to fit millions of pixels in today’s smartphones that feature other cutting-edge specs like high screen-to-body ratios and slim designs, pixels inevitably have to shrink so that sensors can be as compact as possible. On the flip side, smaller pixels can result in fuzzy or dull pictures, due to the smaller area that each pixel receives light information from. The impasse between the number of pixels a sensor has, and pixels’ sizes has become a balancing act that requires solid technological prowess.”
As the sensor business has grown over the years, it is this balancing act that remained all important and was always being refined to bring us the amazing photography capabilities we have these days. Samsung have pushed their Isocell technology forward, which essentially isolates disparate pixels with a unique material which prevents light bleed when it hits the sensor.
More recently they have introduced their Nonacell technology, which bins pixels together in a 3×3 array which increases the amount of light absorbed by individual pixels. The latest pixel size on their sensors is 0.7μm (0.7 micrometres), launched with new sensors in September 2019, which only a few years ago seemed impossible to ascertain.
Park believes that by furthering this improvement in their technology they could get to a usable 600-megapixel camera sensor. While this may not be ready (or necessary) for smartphones anytime soon, a 600-megapixel camera sensor has other uses, like for autonomous vehicles and drones. The human eye has a resolution of around 500-megapixels, Park says, just to give some context. He adds that “we might even have sensors that can see microbes not visible to the naked eye.”
