Samsung is working on a 600-megapixel mobile camera sensor: Report

Samsung is reportedly working on a whopping 600-megapixel camera sensor.

Tipster Ice Universe has revealed a slide from what appears to be an internal document or presentation. The slide further details how Samsung aims to deliver the 600-megapixel camera sensor.

According to the slide, Samsung plans to offer a higher resolution camera sensor as 4K and 8K videos are increasingly becoming mainstream. The company also wants its ISOCELL to solve the problem of the camera bump. GSMArena in its report points out that a 1/0.57-inch sensor would cover about 12% of the real estate on the back panel. It would protrude about 22mm.

That said, camera sensors have indeed become bigger and better in the last couple of years. Already, 48-megapixel, 64-megapixel, and 108-megapixel camera sensors have become mainstream.

Even as Sony has IMX line of mobile camera sensors, Samsung also offers its own ISOCELL series. For mobile devices, its highest-end sensors are ISOCELL HM2, ISOCELL HM1, and ISOCELL HMX. Let’s take the HM2 for example.

The sensor is equipped with a nine-pixel binning technology and Smart-ISO. It has 0.7um pixel size, 1/1.52-inch optical format, and 108-megapixel resolution.

“Samsung’s innovative ISOCELL Plus technology makes pixels in the ISOCELL HM2 more powerful and gives them the ability to produce vivid, lifelike color. The technology uses special materials to separate pixels and reduce interference between them. This improves color fidelity and light sensitivity, so every sky looks just as bright and blue in your images as it did in real life,” the company explains on its website.

Also read: Samsung Galaxy S21 appears on Geekbench with 8GB RAM, Snapdragon 888

Interestingly, Yongin Park, Head of Sensor Business Team at Samsung, in April this year, had revealed the company’s plans to offer a 600-megapixel sensor that could capture more details than the human eye can see.

“The image sensors we ourselves perceive the world through – our eyes – are said to match a resolution of around 500 megapixels (Mp). Compared to most DSLR cameras today that offer 40Mp resolution and flagship smartphones with 12Mp, we as an industry still have a long way to go to be able to match human perception capabilities,” he wrote in a post.

“Simply putting as many pixels as possible together into a sensor might seem like the easy fix, but this would result in a massive image sensor that takes over the entirety of a device. 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,” Park noted.