Samsung's Manufacturing New 108 Megapixel Camera!!!!!

Samsung's 108-megapixel smartphone camera sensor is more practical than it sounds
It's not meant to jam your phone with massive photos

Comparing megapixels has fallen out of fashion for the most part, at least when it comes to smartphone cameras. In fact, the iPhone XR camera boasts just 12 megapixels, and every version up to and including the iPhone 6 had just 8 megapixels. Now, however, Samsung and Xiaomi have teamed up to build a 108-megapixel sensor destined to fit inside of a future smartphone. It’s the first commercial chip of its kind to break the century mark in terms of resolution. And while it’s an impressive feat, you probably shouldn’t expect it to work just like its 100-megapixel competition which typically costs as much as a decent SUV.

Samsung and Xiaomi's chip is called the 1/1.33-inch ISOCELL Bright HMX sensor, which is—if you can believe it—even more complicated to decode than it seems at first glance. The 1/1.33-inch number reads simple enough, but it's actually a reference back to a rather arcane sensor sizing standard that started in video cameras. In reality, it's still smaller than the chip inside a camera like Sony's RX100 VII advanced compact camera, but bigger than a typical smartphone sensor.

That extra real estate on Samsung’s chip makes space for 108 million pixels, but its ultimate goal is to use that raw data to churn out 27-megapixel images. Samsung calls this process “pixel-merging,” in which the camera groups several smaller pixels together (in this case, it’s groups of four). That allows them to act like much bigger pixels and pull in more light.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the concept has been around for quite some time. Back in 2013, Nokia introduced the PureView 808 smartphone camera, which used a 40-megapixel sensor to churn out high-quality (roughly) 5-megapixel images by grouping 7 pixels together.

How does that tech compare to a regular 27-megapixel sensor? That depends on a wide number of variables like the camera lens and the software doing the image processing, but the PureView 808 provided some truly impressive performance for its time.