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Hardware

Samsung Just Made a 108MP Camera for Phones (thurrott.com) 63

Posted by msmash from the fwiw dept.
Samsung has announced a new image sensor for phones that breaks records. Built-in partnership with Xiaomi, the new Samsung ISOCELL Bright HMX is the world's first mobile image sensor that goes beyond 100 million pixels. From a report: At 108MP, the new sensor allows for higher quality pictures in different light conditions. The resolution, which Samsung says is equivalent to DSLR cameras, allows for "extremely sharp photographs rich in detail," according to the firm. It's the first mobile image sensor to adopt a large lens size of 1/1.33-inch that allows the lens to absorb more light, leading to better quality pictures in low-light conditions. There's also an intelligent Tetracell technology that uses a pixel-merging method to "imitate" big-pixel sensors, allowing phones to produce brighter 27MP images. [...] The image sensor is built to tackle video recording as well, with Samsung claiming no losses in field-of-view when recording videos at resolutions up to 6K at 30fps.
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Samsung Just Made a 108MP Camera for Phones More

Samsung Just Made a 108MP Camera for Phones

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  • Sensor size is more important than megapixels! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @11:27AM (#59079276)
    Anyone who enjoys photography knows that sensor size is more important than megapixels. They also know that anyone who tells you a phone takes as good of pictures as a DSLR is lying. Open your image on a 4k monitor and you'll see. Anything you take on a camera will look better, especially indoors. In order for a phone to take as good of pics as a full frame DSLR, it would be huge and heavy. We don't lug 20 lbs of gear around to be hipsters. Heavy lenses and large sensors really do take much better pictures.

    The smallest full frame camera was recently announced by sigma. It's about the size of a late 90s cell phone without a lens. If you're willing to carry something that looks like a 90s Motorola flip phone, then you'll have DSLR quality. Until then, it's just marketing designed to fool naive consumers and drive people like me crazy.

    It's like speakers...sure a phone may have good speakers "for a phone," but nothing you want to carry in your pocket will sound as good as real speakers. The same applies for cameras. Samsung's sensor may be good "for a phone," but if you view it on any screen bigger than 4", you'll see a huge difference in quality between a real camera and one thrown on as an afterthought on your phone.

    • THANK YOU! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by p51d007 ( 656414 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @11:38AM (#59079304)
      Perfect example of sensor size, versus megapixel count....when that MS phone with the (I think it was) 20MP...there was a commercial, showing a couple teenagers at the back of a concert, took a photo of the stage area, then zoom/cropped the photo to make it look like they were right up front. THAT is the whole purpose of "more is better" in photography per se. To loose less detail, when you zoom/crop. It won't give you a "better" picture. Given the fact that even an APS-C sensor is 7-8 times the size of the largest smartphone sensor, the physics alone tells you it will have a better photo quality than a pinhole sensor camera. Along with that, stuffing more and more sensors that close, you end up with the signal to noise ratio going bonkers with crosstalk. Then, the smartphone camera software has to hopefully squish out the noise, which muddies the photo. BIGGER individual sensors, would be better than stuffing more and more into a pinhole sensor. Shoot, a GOOD quality 8MP sensor, it capable of an A3 or 11x17 size print, but who prints. But, as you say, this is all marketing...more is better, and unfortunately, consumers fall for it all the time.
      • I do want to add on to one thing you said. People bring up printing and idiots say, "I don't want to print it, so my iPhone is just fine...no need for a camera." There is massive difference when viewing on a monitor as well. Yes, even if you're just posting on facebook, I guarantee that my camera pics look noticeably better than what you took on your iPhone. With each monitor upgrade, the difference becomes greater.

        Camera phones are like food served from 7 Eleven...convenient, but far inferior to the

        • Is it intel or power pc?

        • I agree with your post, except I want to point out that as an owner of several dSLR cameras I still shoot from my phone as well. In the old days Polaroids were a thing for similar reasons. Sometimes good enough is good enough or you have to use what's in your pocket or you want to use the picture now, and so on.

          • "Sometimes good enough is good enough or you have to use what's in your pocket.."

            That's hit the nail on the head! Any pro-snapper will tell you countless tales of the perfect shot that got away 'cos they didn't have a camera with them. As a professional myself one of the best things I ever bought was a Sony mirrorless pocket camera for $500, I just keep it charged and in my bag wherever I go. In the last 4 years that little pocket camera may not have netted me much by way of sales as my DSLRs do but it's ce

            • Sometimes expressed as, "The best camera in the world is the one you have with you."

              Phones excel at street shooting, because they are ubiquitous and unobtrusive. As soon as you pull out an SLR, people close to it tense up and the camera comes between you and the scene. Using a wide, short-barreled prime and touchscreen mode that allows you to shoot from the hip rather than looking through a viewfinder helps, but the phone still gives you a degree of subject-friendliness that even a small point-and-shoot doe

              • I doubt very much that HCB, coiner of the phrase "the decisive moment", would have anything to do with camera phones. Shutter lag is horrendous on those things. The decisive moment will be long gone before a camera phone even finishes focusing. HCB would be shooting with one of those $7K digital Leica rangefinders, a small camera that uses small lenses and takes the picture when you release the shutter, dammit.

                • Or would he enjoy being able to just hold the button down to machine-gun the action with burst mode, then pick the decisive-moment image later? That's an option he never had on his Leica.

        • I would imagine that you angle was better than hers!

      • Given the fact that even an APS-C sensor is 7-8 times the size of the largest smartphone sensor, the physics alone tells you it will have a better photo quality than a pinhole sensor camera.

        Agreed. But images on my DSLR from a decade ago would turn into a grainy mess when shooting at ISO 1600. The current crop of sensors can go up to ISO 25600 before that happens, which is 4 stops faster.

        The current generation of top tier smartphone camera sensors is about 7.6x5.7 mm = 43.3 mm^2 [wikipedia.org]. Compare to an APS-C

        • APS-C sensors aren't one set size, but rather a range of sizes. My Nikon D3500 has an APS-C sensor size of 23.5 mm x 15.6 mm, but some cameras have APS-C sensors as large as 28.7 mm x 19.1 mm.

          There is no phone camera that can compare to a DSLR, even an old one. Phone cameras produce images with fringing, chromatic aberration, high depth of field, low dynamic range, noise removal/over smoothing and can't shoot raw. I've shot pictures on my phone that look good "for a phone" but none of them approach the clar

        • DSLRs and additive-color computer displays are ENORMOUSLY better for photographing black cats. If you photographed a black cat with Kodacolor Gold & had the photos printed at Walgreens, you'd have been lucky if you saw a black shadow with golden eyes staring back at you. In contrast, just about any phone camera capable of HDR can capture fine shadow detail and make it clearly visible when viewed on a monitor.

          That said, I had some prints made at Walgreens last Christmas, and they came out looking like th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      I've been waiting to pull the trigger on a mirrorless camera, but they keep getting better.

      • I've been waiting to pull the trigger on a mirrorless camera, but they keep getting better.

        Yes, they are.

        Sony has put out some good offerings...and well, hell, I think Fuji has a mirrorless medium format camera that is showing some amazing stuff, but is waaaay too $$ for me at this time.

        I"m waiting for Canon to put out something in their new mirrorless RF mount line...that is in the level of the 5D series mirror slapper cameras.

        They have released some remarkable lenses for the RF mount, but haven't come

      • I've been waiting to pull the trigger on a mirrorless camera, but they keep getting better.

        Did you think they were going to stop getting better at some point?

        The biggest investment in a camera system is lenses and those can be taken from one camera to the next over decades.

      • My neighbour has a Nikon Z7 which is a beautiful camera capable of taking terrific photos.
        But the view through its digital viewfinder still sucks compared to a real (optical) viewfinder.

    • This new sensor IS larger though... 1/1.3"

      Older phones had 1/2.3" or smaller sensors, some newer ones have the equivalent of around a 1/1.7" or 1/1.8" (eg Galaxy S9 is around 43mm^2 16x9 IIRC). 1/1.3 is pretty darn big for a cell phone. If they can make the optics work without it being a big camera bulge, I'll be impressed.

      • Physics stops a small lens, and a small sensor gathering more light, and software can only help so much ...

        The reason proper cameras have a big lens is to gather more light without distorting it, the reason they have a bigger sensor is to gather more photons so there is less noise ...

      • What's up with all this "1-over" stuff? It's been a while since I did fractions in school, but unless I am very much mistaken, 1/1.33 is 3/4 (or close enough). 1/1.33 smells like something the marketing department came up with, and indeed this Web page [dougkerr.net] claims that's exactly what happened.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by OYAHHH ( 322809 )

          Ok,

          The website, thurrott.com, honestly should be ashamed of how poorly their write-up of this technology actually is. If you look at the actual press release you will see that the 1/1.33 is actually referring to sensor size. Not lens size as thurrott.com says. BIG DIFFERENCE.

          As to the 1/1.33 being used, it is used because they don't want you to be able to quickly & accurately compare it to other sensor sizes. And I concur, this notation is emanating from a marketing department who knows they can't c

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Cederic ( 9623 )

            To be perfectly honest, after reading the press release I cannot ascertain what 1/1.33 inches refers to at all. Is that the height by the width? Or is it a diagonal? And why is it in inches? Not one reputable company has camera dimensions quoted in inches. Not one.

            It is a standard convention when describing camera sensors less than one inch in size.

            See the answers on https://photo.stackexchange.co... [stackexchange.com] for the reasons why.

        • How about 19 mm?
          Everything else in camera is metric, why not sensor size?
    • While your statement is correct, you are talking about output interpolated pixels. The technology this article is talking about is pixel density in the physical sensor. A whole different ball game. If this works as advertised it absolutely will enhance picture quality for a same-size sensor regardless of any downstream software interpolation and in some cases probably eliminate the need for software interpolation to achieve desired pixel density.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I think you overestimate how much you can actually see on a 4K monitor, a pathetic 8MP is quite doable on a cell phone if you have decent light and don't need shallow depth of field. I mean it's fun to pixel peep at an actual 100MP camera like the GFX100 (a $10000 medium format camera), but you're looking at a tiny corner of the image at 1:1. More often it's now about other things like the range if you're shooting sports or nature, bokeh, macro, low light, astro, timelapse or something else that pushes the

    • Well of course, physical limitations of the lens and sensor size set it's limits, but don't underestimate how much software trickey can narrow the gap. And there is a lot of software trickery going on in cellphone cameras. You remember the crap that used to be early consumer digital cameras and early cellphone cameras? The physics haven't really improved, but the quality sure has, most of it is down to software image manipulation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by b0bby ( 201198 )

        Totally agree - while certainly the image quality on a DSLR in most cases is better I can take "Night mode" pictures on my Pixel 3 which you would be very hard pressed to do hand held with a DSLR. The software magic in there is very impressive.

    • Anyone who enjoys photography knows that sensor size is more important than megapixels

      Phone manufacturers are pushing ludicrous pixel counts in hopes that that users will be able to substitute digital cropping for the focal length range of big cameras.

      • It also enables ultra wide-angle shots that would be aesthetically unacceptable without massive amounts of digital denonvolution to undo the fisheye distortion you'd otherwise have.

        In theory, you could also make sensors with different sensitivity levels, so that any given shot would ALSO include pixels that were intentionally over and under-exposed, both to increase dynamic range and give you a second chance to save an otherwise-failed shot in post-production.

        In a sense, new camera designs cheapen the benef

    • This. I have a 24MP mirrorless, and the fact that it's 24MP is one of the least interesting things about it.

      Granted, modern cell phones with good software can do some absolutely amazing things. But their small size limits them. The biggest things a mirrorless or DSLR get you are the ability to switch out different lenses for different situations, much larger light gathering area, less distortion of the image due to the optics, and there are ones with good sensors that are vastly superior to those you get

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      Open your image on a 4k monitor and you'll see.

      Not unless your 4K monitor is a hundred feet across. But then, if someone thinks you can take DSLR quality pictures with a lens the size of your fingernail, they've probably also bought into the idea that a 40" monitor which is higher resolution than a movie isn't just an idiot-tax.

  • Tiny lenses and noise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @11:31AM (#59079280)

    Two things:

    The tiny, cheap lenses built into cell phones are at this point the biggest factor in determining image quality, not the number of pixels. Is the resulting image sharp? Is it free from chromatic aberrations? Etc. Independent testing of the lens components is really a requirement at this point -- perhaps someone like DXOMARK can figure out a way to do it?.

    The more pixels you have in the same-sized sensor, the smaller they must necessarily be. This means by definition you have fewer photons hitting each pixel, which means you get more noise. Yes, you can somewhat offset that with fancy "noise reduction" math, but you can't cheat the physics either.

    108 MP in a cell phone is a stunt. Actually, in most "real" cameras, it's a stunt. Without decent glass optimized for what you're shooting, you can't take advantage of it, and you're just creating bigger files for no good reason.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Matheus ( 586080 )

      From TFS and TFA and other articles on the matter.. They are not providing you with 108MP images. Recent advancements are using multiple 'raw' pixels to give you better quality with the resulting unified pixels. SO 108MP gives the app 26MP of actual image and they've been able to given you significantly better pixel quality going that route than with older tech straight 26MP sensors.

      I take a LOT of cell phone photography (it's the camera they'll let me bring in when DSLRs aren't allowed) SO I'll believe it

      • This is exactly why a bigger sensor helps, and more pixels only helps a little ... ... normally adding more pixels in the same area of sensor makes the image worse - this is a little larger, so the gain in averaging raw pixels might overcome this ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by olddoc ( 152678 )
      I came here to say this.

    • If you look at the DXO mark measurements of camera lenses you will find that most kit lenses can actually only resolve less than 10 megapixels of detail. Mobile lenses will be less. This sensor may have advantages in flexibility and some gains in sensitivity from pixel binning but the maximum resolution is completely pointless as there are no lenses to make use of it.

    • No it's not a stunt. High res sensors are the reason cellphone cameras get you as good an image as they do in the first place. Trick is, the image you are getting isn't the same image the sensor is putting out, it's a reconstruction and with many phones it's a reconstrution from several raw images or even different physical cameras. The image you are getting has been heavily digested by algorythms that trade information content of input to quality of output and they do a pretty good job I must say. The imag

  • Pixel size first, then count (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @11:31AM (#59079282)

    Other companies are moving away from playing the marketing game of packing more pixels in the sensor because it leads to worse images. After all, when the sensor's pixels get that small, any given pixel will receive a wildly different number of photons compared to its adjacent pixels, leading to a lot of noise across the image. Instead, others are marketing the exact opposite: that their pixels are getting bigger and bigger, leading to better quality images. I thought that this sort of "bigger = better" MP marketing had largely fallen by the wayside with Nokia's obsolescence, so it's a bit odd to see Samsung carrying the torch a few years later.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I don't know if it scales down to cell phone size but at least in full frame cameras they've made a lot of advances lately to reduce the wasted light with back-side illumination. Like Sony had the a7s ii at 12 MP, but the a7 iii has almost the same low light performance with 24 MP, even though they're both full frame cameras meaning the latter has much smaller pixels. Obviously this doesn't make it better than a low resolution sensor, but the penalty is much less than it used to be while still being able to

  • I personally believe that these companies R&D this kind of tech many years ahead of market release - oh look, we managed to create a 1 Gigapixel camera sensor - then keep it on the shelf, until such time that their products become "seriously boring", and "it is time to unveil 2011's R&D breakthroughs to the end consumer, with a feature or two crippled of course...". I'll bet my hat that not only Samsung, but also 5 or 6 other tech companies had this kind of 100MP image sensor for years, and now brea

  • Well, 1/10,000th the way to the proverbial mis-advertised "million megapixel" camera.

    You might live to see it. Eat your Wheaties!

  • My Samsung can sometimes make it until 4 or 5 pm.

    Pouring electrons across more CCD wells is not likely to improve that situation.
  • Problem is, the image file sizes are huge, and I can't even get much detail when zooming in on them because the optical noise is high and the lenses are crap. Bummer.

    • Problem is, the image file sizes are huge, and I can't even get much detail when zooming in on them because the optical noise is high and the lenses are crap. Bummer.

      Indeed.

      I do not want a 100MP camera. Just improve the quality on a 16MP camera instead. Why waste drive space on unavoidable optical noise and pictures which aren't better, only bigger?

      • pictures which aren't better, only bigger?

        Not a problem, they do extra smoothing and compression, so their 12000x8000 JPEG files are the same size as the competition's 6000x4000 JPEG files. :-\

  • ...that they will make their phone last longer than their previous generation. Samsung has become notorious for using cheaper SSD memory in their phones according to various sources (Louis Rossmann mentioned in one of his video this, and he has had several Samsung phones), and if you do a quick google search, slowdowns is a prominent issue in Samsung phones according to easy sources, albeit your mileage may vary depending on how you use any smartphone.

    I have personal gripe with Samsung products myself, my S

    • Are they really cheapening out on 1000$ Galaxy S and Note phones or are you talking about mid and low range phones?

  • The resolution, which Samsung says is equivalent to DSLR cameras, allows for "extremely sharp photographs rich in detail," according to the firm.

    Maybe. There is a LOT more to a sharp image than just the megapixel count. What I'm wondering is how they stabilize the image. When you get up to 50MP or more it starts to get really challenging to stabilize the lens so you don't get motion blur. Easier with a small sensor to be sure but I have to imagine it still would be a challenge. It can be really hard to handhold a 100MP camera without some really robust image stabilization.

  • with my old Olympus Em1.1 and Sony A7s. How dumb must I look to hold my camera to my eye and not be able to make a phone call with it.

  • Borrowed concepts from astrophotography (Score:3)

    by E-Lad ( 1262 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:37PM (#59079554)

    The larger aperture is a no-brainer when trying to collect more photons. The "pixel merging" is what is known as "binning", a common technique with astrophotography CCDs where the light from a group of pixels (say, a 2x2 or 4x4 block of adjacent pixels) is summed to produce one brighter virtual ("binned") pixel. Binning's downside is that it eats away at the sensor's effective pixel array size and resolution, producing a narrower field of view (akin to a cropped sensor), but it seems that Samsung gets around this by brute force - just have a lot of pixels to begin with.

    • Field of view is a lens function - focal length of the lens versus imaging area of the sensor. Binning doesn't change the field of view it just reduces the sensor resolution.

  • I'd prefer to have a 6MP camera with the same sensor area so that it's at least possible 1) for my photos to have some dynamic range (without the help of pseudo-HDR) and 2) to take photos of something other than the noonday Sun.

  • Comparisons with DSLRs are pointless. As is the "real" camera users who like to think they stand apart. The images are not viewed or used in the same way.

    With this sensor, it is extremely unlikely that anyone would ever view a 108MPix image - how would you do that on a piddly-small screen with (at best) a small fraction of the number of display pixels available? Even current generation phone cameras have too many pixels to use sensibly. What this *might* allow is some N.R. due to "binning" and some possib

  • This is not the old "megapixels war". (Score:3)

    by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:33PM (#59079780)
    Lot of posts saying "ohh, it's just more of the pixel wars!". It's not, They use those pixels for good reasons to interpolate down into better overall images. So those tons of extra pixels are very useful and important. You don't get a 180mp image out of the camera, you get a much more reasonable size composed of interpolated pixels and a better overall image than if you had "native" pixels of the interpolated size.
  • I'm not going to be able to take a picture and then zoom up until I see bacteria. Well, what's the point then.
  • Samsung sell the phones and Google ends up hosting the image backups? This cannot be sustainable....
  • Don't forget about the ridiculous counting method that camera manufacturers apply: According to their method, the independently lit color sub-pixels of your "4k display" add up to 3840 * 2160 * 3 = 24.8 "Megapixels".

    So actually, this 108 "MP" sensor has just 1.4 independently measures sensor cells per light-emitting sub-pixel of your "4k" display - that isn't too much...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      Sorry, flawed math.. it's of course 4.3 independently measured sensor cells per light-emitting sub-pixel of your "4k" display. Still just enough to do a "2 times digital zoom" by cropping to the center.
  • Dear mobile camera manufacturers: for the love of every god/dess that ever existed, can we PLEASE have some sort of standardized lens/filter mount system for mobile cameras, FINALLY?

    There are dozens of highly useful filters and adapters, which can -and are- be produced in mobile-sized versions. The only problem is, trying to attach the damn things. Your options are: hold it by hand (goodbye optical quality), over-the-edge plastic clips, or (I kid you not) double-sided tape. Your options if you have a pro

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