China's Xiaomi is planning to launch a smartphone with a 108-megapixel camera.
According to the company's announcement on Weibo (via Android Authority), Xiaomi is working with Samsung to deliver the camera, which will take 12,032x9,024 pixel snaps. There's no firm timeline for the launch; Xiaomi's promo material merely says "see you later."
Credit: XiaomiThis probably sounds like an unusually big leap, given that smartphone cameras of today only go up to 48 megapixels -- and it is. Xiaomi will first launch a phone with a 64-megapixel camera, for which it has a far more solid timeline: The first phone with the 64-megapixel camera will debut in India in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Xiaomi will be using Samsung's GW-1 sensor for that phone, and we already know the specs of that one. It takes 9,280x6,944 pixel photos with a 0.8 micron pixel size, and will typically use a technique called pixel binning to create great-looking 16-megapixel photos.
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Given my experience with ultra-high-res smartphone cameras, most notably the Huawei P30 Pro's 40-megapixel camera, these huge resolutions aren't overkill. On the P30 Pro, you take 10-megapixel pixel-binned photos by default, which allows for a spectacular low-light performance. And if you really need the full 40-megapixel resolution, you can turn it on in the camera's settings, though these photos won't look very good in anything less than perfect light conditions.
Samsung's GW-1 chip should further improve on this concept with Tetracell technology, which should produce brighter 16-megapixel photos in low light, and more detailed 64-megapixel photos in daylight, while its 3D HDR tech should improve the quality of photos and videos even in bad lighting conditions.
Xiaomi offered no details about its upcoming 108-megapixel sensor, but it will likely use pixel binning to produce far more manageable 27-megapixel photos. In any case, it seems that the phone megapixel wars are far from over.
