Who the heck needs 200 megapixels on their camera? Smartphone manufacturers, of course. It’s always a race to the next big number on a spec sheet and it seems that a surprise contestant is tipped to be in the lead for 200 million pixels’ worth of bragging rights.
The longtime Chinese tech blogger who goes by Ice universe now believes Motorola, subsidiary of Lenovo, will be the first to sport a 200MP camera on a phone sometime in the first half of next year. This will be followed by Xiaomi later on, and then Samsung “by 2023.”
SamMobile reported on Samsung’s announcement of the 200MP ISOCELL HP1 sensor back in September. Each pixel measures 0.64µm or, at a 2×2 bin-down to 50MP, 1.28µm across.
If you’re wondering why the company isn’t calling dibs on its own stock first, we’re in the same boat. Ice universe previously indicated that the Galaxy S22 Ultra would feature the 108MP ISOCELL HM3 sensor with 0.8µm pixels (roughly 1.35µm at a simulated 50MP resolution) while the standard S22 and S22+ would go for 50MP ISOCELL GN5 sensors with measly 1µm receptors. Perhaps Samsung couldn’t hold off on setting in specs for the new phones.
As for Motorola, well, all we’re tracking is the upcoming Edge X and we don’t see hints of a 200MP camera on that machine.
If you’re worried about how a theoretical phone will be able to handle such a camera, consider that the ISP (image signal processor) in this year’s Snapdragon 888 Plus from Qualcomm was barely able to grasp the potential of a 200MP camera while the more recent Snapdragon 780G maxes out at 192MP. MediaTek’s more recent Dimensity 9000 SoC, however, will handily support a sensor up to 320MP.
We’ll have to see about how much performance headroom we can get when these new phones with 200MP cameras come out.
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