It seems that the war of megapixels on smartphones has just begun, as one company after another announces the construction of mobile phones with the oversized camera.
Sony and Samsung both announced in the summer of 2018 the 48 megapixel image sensor designed for smartphones and we are slowly starting to hear details of the first devices and how they will take advantage of the huge number of pixels. Honor has just announced the View 20 smartphone, which will use Sony's IMX586 sensor with Huawei's Kirin 980 processor. And Huawei has already announced the Nova 4, details of which are expected to be revealed next week.
Meanwhile, the Xiaomi is also ready to display a 48 megapixel phone. Lin Bin, co-founder and president of the company, published a photo on Weibo with an unidentified device, which carries the legendary "48MP camera" next to the lens. There are no other details, but Lin says he will be coming in January.
Both Samsung as well as Sony make similar announcements with their sensors. They have tiny 0,8μm pixels, but the sensors themselves are generally larger than most of their competitors at a ratio of 1 to 2,0 inches. The companies say that each individual pixel can take information from its neighbors to produce the equivalent of a 12-megapixel image, an image captured at 1,6 μm pixels. For comparison, top phones like the Pixel 3 and iPhone XS have 12 megapixel sensors with 1,4 μm pixels.
As always, specifications rarely tell the whole story when it comes to the image quality of smartphones. We look forward to testing these phones to see how their announcements match reality.
