
Sony’s smartphone division continues to turn in unimpressive
performance, but the company remains the market leader in image sensors.
Its latest 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.
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
Sony
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. Sony is keeping the size down to 8mm diagonal,
meaning there won’t be the need for a huge camera bump, 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
3,000 yen ($27) each.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/31878
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