ZTE is one of the companies that try to push camera tech to new heights. The latest experiment with last year’s Axon 20 Pro brought the first commercially available under-display selfie camera on a smartphone, albeit not with the best results. Still, it was a novel feature to put on a smartphone and it brought the smartphone a lot of attention. ZTE seems to be at it again, teasing the next flagship model which will be equipped with the highest resolution camera on a smartphone.
A teaser for the ZTE Axon 30 Pro 5G was spotted on Weibo (via GSM Arena) that was posted by ZTE’s director of the Consumer Experience Department, Lu Qianhao, and showed a silhouette of what could be the smartphone’s camera housing. In the post, he talked about the advantages of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 and mentioned that it supports camera resolutions of up to 200MP. GSM Arena notes that this is a not-so-subtle hint that the upcoming smartphone will feature a 200MP sensor manufactured by Samsung.
There are a few interesting tidbits about this information, the first being that the sensor size will actually be smaller than the 108MP sensor on the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, which could affect how much light is captured by the sensor. ZTE does mention how the Snapdragon 888 can support very low-light image capture, which brings us to the second interesting tidbit that ZTE may make up for the lack of sensor size by including two different pixel-binning modes with its camera.
When it comes to pixel-binning, smartphone cameras normally go for a 4-in-1 approach which combines four pixels into one, which lowers the overall output resolution but allows each “pixel” to gather more light information. With the Axon 30 Pro 5G, this will still be present with a 4-in-1 mode outputting 50MP stills, but there will be an additional 16-in-1 binning mode that will output 12.5MP images and could allow for much brighter images if done right.
For now, there are still many unknowns about the upcoming smartphone, beyond the fact that it will likely be powered by the Snapdragon 888, so much of this is to be taken with a grain of salt. One big question that lingers is whether the company has taken time to improve its under-display selfie technology, as it will reportedly be on this new model, and its last iteration was far from the best front-facing camera on a smartphone.
