Samsung shows off its 200MP camera sensor with the animal we’ll be taking the most pics of anyway
There’s a good chance that at least a couple components in the phone you’re holding right now — regardless of whose name is on the box — are made by Samsung. From displays, to flash storage, to vibration motors, to camera sensors — you name it, and the South Korean company probably has a factory for it already. Even with that kind of success, there’s always the temptation to show off — especially when you’ve got some high-end new hardware on the way. Right now, Samsung’s got megapixels on the brain, and it’s looking to promote its recently announced 200MP sensorin a spectacular way.
The star of the show here is Samsung’s ISOCELL HP1 camera sensor, a 200MP component that’s so new it’s not even in any smartphone yet, and the team had to set up a test board just to use it. While that means we’re probably missing out on a lot of the tuning and some of the advanced algorithm magic we get on Galaxy phones, plus the fact that the subject was literally a cat (those fur babies never stay still), the result here still came out pretty dang impressive — at least, it was looking sharp enough for Samsung to want to print it out on a huge 28x22-meter canvas made of twelve stitched-together 2.3-meter-long pieces, which was then hung on the side of a building. Samsung had a point to prove about the sensor’s ability to capture super-detailed shots, and it sure feels like it did.
TheISOCELL HP1 camera sensorwas unveiled back in September last year and its crazy-dense 200MP resolution is an industry first. While no current phones feature it, we’re expecting to get to know it in hardware like the upcomingMotorola Frontier. The sensor uses Samsung’s updated pixel-binning technology to optimize light sensitivity based on changing shooting environments, while getting some help from the latest deep-learning algorithms. That sounds lovely, but we’re going have to wait to get our hands on this hardware for ourselves before passing any real judgment.
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