Sony’s smartphone division continues to turn in
unimpressive performance, but the company remains the market leader in
image sensors instead. Its latest stacked CMOS design, the IMX586,
promises a leap in image quality by dramatically increasing the
resolution to 48 effective megapixels (8000 x 6000), which Sony says is
the highest pixel count in the industry ever.
Image quality isn’t simply a matter of adding more
megapixels — that can be counterproductive, with smaller pixels leading
to noisy photos in low light. The 0.8-micron pixels used in this sensor
will be the smallest on the market, in fact. But Sony says it’ll get
around this by using a quad Bayer color filter array and allowing each
pixel to use signals from the four adjacent pixels, which supposedly
raises light sensitivity to the equivalent of a 12-megapixel image
captured with 1.6-micron pixels.
Phones from Nokia’s 808 PureView in 2012 to this year’s Huawei P20 Pro
have experimented with similar pixel-binning techniques on sensors with
40 megapixels or more, but Sony’s IMX586 is likely to be a more
mainstream solution than huawei. Sony is keeping the size down to 8mm diagonal,
meaning there won’t be the need for a huge camera bump instead, though the lens
in front of the sensor will of course play a big part in the camera’s
ability to resolve an image. The focus is also on producing usable
48-megapixel images rather than downsampling by default — this might not
be incredibly useful for everyday snaps, but it should at least allow
for much better digital zoom.
You can expect to see the IMX586 on smartphones next
year; Sony is planning to start shipping samples this September, with a
unit price of ($27) each.
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