Your phone supports a 320MP camera, but companies choose to skip it

The smartphone industry has been through a brutal megapixel war over the last few years, jumping to 48MP, 50MP, 64MP, and 108MP cameras. Companies then upped the ante in 2022 and 2023 by offering 200MP camera phones, and we’ve stayed at this resolution since then.

Did you know that recent flagship Android phones actually support more than 200MP sensors, though? In fact, they support 320MP cameras. However, companies haven’t adopted 320MP cameras just yet. Here’s why.

Wait, my phone supports 320MP cameras?

Yep, if you bought a high-end Android phone in the last two years, there’s a chance it actually supports 320MP cameras. That’s because most chipmakers have now enabled 320MP support in their recent flagship processors.

This trend started with MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000, which powered several Android phones in 2022. The Taiwanese chipmaker continued to offer this feature in its subsequent high-end SoCs. Meanwhile, Samsung’s Exynos 2400 chip also supports 320MP cameras. Qualcomm was late to the party and only hopped on this trend with the current Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.

So, if you bought a phone like the OnePlus 13, the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, or the vivo X200 Pro, your phone could technically make use of a 320MP camera. In fact, older devices like the Exynos-equipped Galaxy S24/S24 Plus and vivo X100 Pro also support this capability.

The biggest reason why we haven’t actually seen phones with 320MP cameras is that there simply aren’t any 320MP smartphone camera sensors on the market yet from major suppliers. We have heard rumors for a while that Samsung Semiconductor is working on this tech, but there’s been no announcement until now.

The good news is that Samsung previously stated that its ultimate goal was to create a camera sensor that matched the human eye’s resolution (~600MP), so 320MP would be a stepping stone to get there.

It’s also worth noting that chipmakers only offer rudimentary snapshot support for 320MP cameras at this stage. That means no multi-frame image processing or other advanced tricks to spruce up the final picture. History already shows us that full-resolution 200MP pictures don’t necessarily look great, so I’d expect full-resolution 320MP images to be similarly underwhelming.

Nevertheless, the fact that these major chipmakers all settled on 320MP camera support strongly suggests that phones with these cameras will be a matter of “when” and not “if.”