New image sensors announced by both Sony and Samsung earlier this year point to a potential megapixel war in the months ahead, as vendors race to bring out smartphones with ever-bigger megapixel cameras.
Both Sony and Samsung had earlier announced they would soon launch 48-megapixel image sensor. Last week, Honor said it would launch its View 20 phone with Sony’s IMX586 sensor mated to Kirin 980 processor from Huawei and featuring the same punch-hole selfie camera design in front as Huawei’s upcoming Nova 4 phones.
Honor did not provide full details on the View 20 just yet — that will have to wait until a 22 January roll out in Paris for the global model, and the 26 December launch of the Chinese variant. However, what is known is that View 20 will be competing on specs and design far more aggressively than its predecessor the V10.
Meanwhile, Xiaomi is also set to release a 48-megapixel phone in the coming months. Lin Bin, the company’s co-founder and president posted a picture on popular Chinese social media site, Weibo, of an unidentified device bearing the legend ‘48MP camera’ beside the lens, which Lin said would be coming out in January.
Both Samsung and Sony are making similar claims about their sensors: they have tiny 0.8µm pixels, but the sensors themselves are physically larger than most competitors at an overall size of 1/2.0 inches. The companies both say that each individual pixel can take information from its neighbors to produce the equivalent of a 12-megapixel image captured with 1.6µm pixels. For comparison, market-leading phones like the Pixel 3 and iPhone XS have 12-megapixel sensors with 1.4µm pixels.
There have been other companies in the past with phones featuring high-resolution cameras, including Nokia’s 41-megapixel 808 PureView and Lumia 1020, but there are too many variables around software, size, and optics to really compare the implementation. As ever, specs rarely tell the full story and the proof will really depend on the image quality produced by the smartphones.
