Comments Locked

39 Comments

Back to Article

  • shabby - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    Wow almost 4x the size of the sensor in the note 10, impressive.
  • ishould - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    With that many megapickles I wonder if we may start seeing 3x3 pixel binning instead 2x2
  • Tams80 - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    Well, let's do some basic maths then shall we?

    2x2 = 4 pixels. 108/4 = ... wait for it... 27.
    3x3 = 9 pixels. 108/9 = 12.

    Considering the Nokia 808 PureView produced 5 MP or 8 MP images after pixel binning, then this new sensor could be used with 3x3 pixel binning. The sensor size isn't as big though...
  • quiksilvr - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    Isn't it sad that a smartphone that came out 7 years ago has a larger sensor than today? That PureView sensor is 1/1.2 and they had a 1" sensor on the Lumix DMC-CM1 and that was "only" a 20MP sensor. Give me a 12MP 1" sensor and I will be happy. No pixel binning, no fuss.
  • Valantar - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    A standard-for-smartphones ~28mm lens for a 1" sensor built to fit the thickness of a modern smartphone would have absolutely horrible distortion and likely not be usable. No thanks. A 10mm camera bump doesn't tempt me either.
  • 808Hilo - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    val: They could design a basic hump with a wide angle lens acting as sensor cover and a magnetic speedbooster ring that acts as interface with a Nikon, etc.

    Adapter ring making FF lenses workable. Every phone from a 855 chip set up has better hardware than 99% of all cams.

    Nikon, Canon etc will just be Android apps in the future unless they start making their own phones.

    So far they have refused and lost gigantic marketshare and sales. This one inch sensor could be their salvation...or not.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, August 15, 2019 - link

    "A 10mm camera bump doesn't tempt me either. "

    whatever happened to those Moto phones with attachable lenses?
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    >Isn't it sad that a smartphone that came out 7 years ago has a larger sensor than today?

    Not really, the width of the sensor format directly determines the camera thickness. The 808 was well over 2x as thick as a today's phones due to the huge camera. There is no need to make such gigantic optical systems with today's sensors. You can get much better performance out of something more reasonable in size.
  • Tams80 - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    The 808 PureView was far more ergonomic than most of today's phones. Even with the camera hump, it actually sat fairly well on a table as well.

    I know it's a very small niche, but that phone really was fantastic. It's quite sad that we've ended up going much more for style over function as well. The OSes today (well Android at least) have no excuse for ever running slowly, yet they do. The Nokia Symbian and Maemo/Meego devices were far more resource efficient. The 808 also had a dedicated ISP for the camera, which helped a lot.
  • Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    More reasonable? Everything anyone offers is way too thin. If decent optics is what it takes to fatten a phone up to a reasonable size, then... that's a double-win.
  • jabber - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    Yeah I'd be happy with a phone another 3mm thick or so if it helped. Bigger battery too! Win win.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    "Everything anyone offers is way too thin."

    I guess Apple started that. So we end up with phones playing card thin and slippery as a trout, so we add some funky rubber ducky just so we can hold it. Regression of human intelligence?
  • zodiacfml - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    a quick Google image search will show you the atrocious camera bump. in other words, it never became popular and its operating system made it worse.
    while a larger sensor will be nice to have which I want, the benefits are not too great vs current sensors when used with HDR and other techniques. The main benefit would be sharper pixels/detail when viewed at 100%, on a monitor, or TV. Noise or DR won't improve much with HDR
  • Tams80 - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    It sounds like you never had one. Elop was the reason there was no true successor to it. Symbian was actually becoming very good and Nokia had Maemo/Meego going very well.
    The device was actually quite elegant, camera bump as well. But then I guess you like glass slabs.
  • extide - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    "promises to allow smartphones to take photos comparable to those from DSLR cameras"

    Yeah... no. Even my 9 year old T2i would be better in almost all cases. Sensor size matters and even APS-C is over 4x the size of a 1/1.33" sensor. These modern sensors are great, but can't beat physics.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    Various companies have made those sort of promises for years and failed to deliver results.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    If the only metric you use in comparison is megapixels.
  • Valantar - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    Well, the sensor might technically be able to beat a low-end DSLR sensor (particularly a slightly old one), but it will only ever be used paired with teeny-tiny smartphone lens elements, so it's never going to perform well no matter what. Give it a decent sized lens and for all we know it might shine.
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    >Yeah... no. Even my 9 year old T2i would be better in almost all cases. Sensor size matters and even APS-C is over 4x the size of a 1/1.33" sensor

    Most APS-C sensors are ancient though since there isn't much money left in dSLRs and since with a huge sensor there really isn't a need to be very sensitive, whereas this is state of the art. I think if you just look at sensitivity, this probably does beat a typical APS-C sensor.

    >These modern sensors are great, but can't beat physics.

    FWIW, overcoming a 4-5x difference in area only requires you to be 4-5x more sensitive, and you can actually do that without running into any physical limits. The funny thing is that since 98% of the money in sensors is in smartphones, they're consistently 5-10 years ahead of what is used in other markets. Consider the difference between an iPhone 4 and and today's iPhone and you can see what a difference 6 or 8 years worth of CMOS improvements have made.
  • extide - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    > FWIW, overcoming a 4-5x difference in area only requires you to be 4-5x more sensitive

    That's a tall order, though. I mean the max sensitivity can be is that it detects 100% of the light hitting it. For something to be 4-5x better it would mean the APS-C sensor would have to be getting no more than 20-25% and this sensor 100%. That's not really realistic.
  • JanW1 - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    It's about signal-to-noise ratio. Increasing signal by a factor of four may be unrealistic. Reducing noise by that much maybe not. In practice it will be a combination of both.
  • Zizy - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    I agree that 9 year old sensor has been greatly surpassed. Heck, Lumia 1020 with 1/1.5" sensor was about the level of 6 year old DSLRs at the time of release if you check reviews. (compared to kit lens; grab say telephoto lens and phones will take another decade to catch up)
    But 5-10 years ahead is BS. When a new APS-C/FF/… sensor gets released, it uses approximately the same tech (slightly behind) as in phones. It is updated much less often though; and the image processing stuff is way behind the phones.
  • zodiacfml - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    No, even a recent 24MP DSLR with kit lens will find it hard to compete with current high-end smartphones because of HDR, the one available in Google's camera app.
    An ASPC kit lens only resolves of roughly 4-6MP of pixel sharp detail and smartphones are really close. Dynamic range and noise goes to smartphones with HDR.
    Video capability and device usability also goes to smartphones. It is sad that I haven't touched my conventional cameras for at least two years now.
    The latest Sony cameras are nice to have but I couldn't justify the cost.
  • Fritzkier - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    Actually, video capabilities on smartphone are pretty bad. Too many over sharpening that gives you "a smartphone look".
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    "Sensor size matters and even APS-C is over 4x the size of a 1/1.33" sensor. "

    I guess, don't know, whether capture accuracy scales down with pixel size? Most cameras have ASP-C, except a Sony and the multi-thousand dollar pro cameras. IOW, if real cameras used sensor pixels from smartphone sensors, how many would there be in a 24X36 sensor? billions?
  • p1esk - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    Here's a crazy idea: why not just have a huge sensor with no lens, and train a neural network to map its raw unfocused input to what would a sensor with lens would receive. Combine this with another crazy idea: use the entire OLED display of a smartphone as a sensor. To train the neural net, walk around recording video on your smartphone with both its screen, and its front camera.
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    >Here's a crazy idea: why not just have a huge sensor with no lens, and train a neural network to map its raw unfocused input to what would a sensor with lens would receive.

    While lensless imaging does exist, if you just have a bare sensor with no optics and point it at a scene, you record a featureless, solid grey frame. No amount of post processing can turn in a image that has every pixel identical into anything meaningful. You have to have actual data to feed into the processing.

    >use the entire OLED display of a smartphone as a sensor

    OLEDs cannot sense light, only produce it.
  • p1esk - Thursday, August 15, 2019 - link

    > OLEDs cannot sense light, only produce it.

    They can, you just need to reverse the polarity. Which can be done when pressing the camera button. But the efficiency will probably be very bad. Still, if you make the sensor 100x larger, and the efficiency degrades 20x you still end up with a 5x better sensor.

    As others said, the main problem is you still need some kind of lens.
  • Skeptical123 - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    I've thought of this too, the issue is this impossible without more data. The same way it's not possible to just keep zooming in on a photo/video even if you have a super computer. You would need something like a lytro camera system on a single die for this to work. Which is about one or two "levels" above an idea like this to be frank. But hey no harm no foul. I'm just waiting to see smart phone companies cut holes in the screen/bezel to be able to put the sensor as far back as possible. With "bezel less" phone. More likely now would to be just integrate them on the same substrate in manufacturing where companies are willing to increase the hardware cost to save that .5mm on overall camera bump and or device thickness.
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link

    >The sensor also supports the company’s 2x2 pixel-binning Tetracell technology, which merges four pixels into one to produce brighter 27 MP photos.

    FYI, CMOS sensors like this cannot perform binning, so what they mean by "2x2 pixel-binning" is really "resizing the image in software after it is acquired".

    >the ISOCELL Bright HMX features Samsung's Smart-ISO capability, which uses high ISOs in darker settings to reduce noise and low ISOs in brighter settings to improve pixel saturation.

    FYI, this is called gain control, and it is implemented on all smart phone cameras ever made. It also doesn't help very much on modern sensors, since the SNR is almost independent of "ISO" (really amplifier gain).

    So essentially, that marketing fluff is saying that they have designed a normal CIS, except larger.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    I don't know what they're calling binning but Samsung's 48MP GM1 does not allow the ISP to access more than 12MP of data (smartphones that allow 48MP output with that sensor rely entirely on interpolation), it may not be binned at the photosite level but the signal's still combined using a pretty primitive algorithm at a low level.

    As for gain, not that many sensors are dual gain (or tri gain), and those with duo/tri gain get almost a stop of DR extra at certain sensitivities (usually in the ISO400-800, and ~12800 range respectively), many sensors on Sony's mirrorless have been tested for this.
  • Samus - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    I wonder what their yields are. I mean 1 dead pixel and the thing is basically useless for a professional. Is there some sort of binning or error diffusion to isolate a bad pixel?
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    "the thing is basically useless for a professional"

    pro photogs used a smartphone? I mean, other than in adverts for smartphones?
  • Samus - Thursday, August 15, 2019 - link

    I know a lot of pro photographers that use a smartphone as their backup camera now.

    They're 'that' good.
  • edzieba - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    Up until a year or two ago I would have been into the "Give me fewer larger pixels and a bigger sensor!" camp. However, seeing the results computational photography is now able to achieve (think Pixel 2 onwards, and some of Huawei's phones) I can see the benefits that very high pixel counts can achieve with proper image synthesis, especially combined with non-full-frame pixel readout (e.g. staggered binning) and multi-frame capture.
  • AdditionalPylons - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    +1
  • s.yu - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    Multiframe‘s really come to yield quality output, however nothing good's come out of quad bayer. Just compare the texture from Gcam and Nokia 9 (multiple identical modules~multiframe) RAW with light edits to any output, RAW or JPG, with any setting, from the recent Huawei flagships, the former is realistic enough to rival MFT while the latter is still clearly in smartphone territory (waxy, flat, fake sharpening) no matter how you fiddle with it.
  • thelongdivider - Wednesday, August 14, 2019 - link

    Samsung should produce a 108MP camera, like an NX2 or something similar. 108MP doesn't make sense for smartphones and will always simply be binned. At APS-C, it could actually be used!
  • Majs Korv - Sunday, August 18, 2019 - link

    Even better dick picks! Bring it!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now