Sensors with exaggerated amounts of megapixels seems to be the latest craze as manufacturers. Samsung already has a 108-megapixel one and announced a few days ago that it was preparing a 200-megapixel one, but today it has become known that it also has one in its hands that doubles this last figure.
It seemed that the ridiculous race to offer the highest megapixel mobile photo sensor was over. And, is that, what technology has told us over the last few years is that the number of megapixels in a sensor has little to do with its quality and, even less, when we talk about mobile photography.
The explanation is really simple: mobile sensors are reduced in size and pixels that form them are small; so, at higher resolution, the pixels are even smaller. Yes, manufacturers take into account these format limitations and therefore integrate technologies capable of grouping pixels to create a larger one.
This type of technology has the mission of alleviating what manufacturers do when launching sensors with ridiculous resolutions on the market. In fact, what gives the best result are sensors with fewer megapixels thanks to their larger pixels and this allows them to capture light better and, therefore, there is more information in the resulting photograph.
Samsung is one of the companies that seems to have on its roadmap launching terminals with sensors whose number of megapixels is inordinateto. At Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra We saw first-hand the potential of a 108 megapixel sensor and, although it was fine to zoom in, it was not quite convincing.
You might think that Samsung when seeing the result of this sensor would stop continuing on this path, but the reality is not like that.. A few weeks ago the South Korean firm announced to the world a sensor with 200 megapixels. This sensor is the ISOCELL HP1 and has 0.64μm pixels, in addition to being able to group up to 16 of these pixels.
The news came and caused a stir, but what has become known today is that Samsung would be preparing a 576 megapixel sensor that could arrive in 2025. This information has been leaked during the SEMI Europe Summit and what has been put on the table is that, luckily, it would not be intended for mobile terminals or, at least, not for now.
We will have to wait for Samsung to comment on the true use they want to give this sensor. At the moment, the only thing that remains clear is that the path that the company is following is still to be developed. sensors with a huge number of megapixels. Maybe in the future we see photographic cameras with sensors made by Samsung.