CEO of Lenovo Has published an image on the Weibo social network in which he raises the imminent launch of a new mobile with a very special feature: a 200 Mpixel sensor. The figure is spectacular, but the truth is that if the evolution of mobile phones has shown anything at the moment, it is that more megapixels do not equal more quality. The question, of course, is how many megapixels are too many. maybe 200?
Where are you going, Motorola. There is not much more data on this theoretical model, but if we pay attention to that 200 Mpixel data, it seems clear that Motorola will use the sensor Samsung ISOCELL HP1 which was announced last fall.
Pixel binning al poder. As with previous sensors with very high resolution, this one makes use of technology pixel binning that combines/groups pixels and that makes the 200 MP sensor end up capturing 12.5 MP images with improved light sensitivity. Whether that terminal’s post-processing software manages to produce a well-defined image remains to be seen.
The comparisons are hateful. Something strange happens with these sensors when, for example, “pure” cameras do not come close to those levels. The Hasselblad H6D-400C It costs 40,000 euros and can achieve 400 Mpixel images by automatically combining several of them, but its sensor is 100 Mpixels.
The Phase One XT IQ4 It has the native sensor with the highest resolution in the segment and “only” reaches 150 Mpixels: it costs 53,000 euros. That leaves certain doubts about the benefits of the 200 Mpixel sensor used by Motorola, as they already existed when the sensors of 64 or 108 Mpixels.
The 200 Mpixels (maybe) don’t matter. For years Google was stuck in sensors of just 8 Mpixels, and in recent times neither it nor Apple have ever entered the megapixel war. We have already said it on numerous occasions, and we repeat it with the iPhone 13 Pro: do not be fooled its 12-megapixel sensors, because there is a lot of juice in them.
Megapixels can help, no doubt, but components like the ISP and of course the postprocessed systems and computational photography are nowadays even more important to obtain good results. Those systems are actually so ambitious that they have become a bit bossy: sometimes they don’t let us take the picture we want.
But having more megapixels sounds good. The truth is that although the tests and comparisons show over and over again that having more megapixels is no guarantee of anything – tell those who later upload them to Instagram – many mobile manufacturers give special importance to this section and They don’t stop advertising phones with high resolution sensors as if that were enough guarantee to win the mobile photography race. It is not, but it does not matter: Samsung is already preparing a 576-megapixel sensor. We were few…
