Samsung unveils a huge 108 MP ISOCELL Bright HMX smartphone camera sensor

Last week Xiaomi said it will be the first smartphone company to bring a phone with a 108MP camera and today Samsung detailed the actual sensor. The Korean manufacturer announced the ISOCELL Bright HMX sensor for smartphones with 108 Megapixels. Its size is 1/1.33”, which is 125% bigger than the 48MP ISOCELL Bright GM1, which lets it retain the same 0.8μm pixel pitch.

Samsung said in a press release that with over 100 million effective pixels, the sensor will produce “exceptional photos even in extreme lighting conditions”. It employs the Tetracell technology, meaning it's effectively a 27MP sensor with 1.6μm pixel pitch.

It comes with the Smart-ISO - a mechanism that selects the level of amplifier gains according to the illumination and switched to a low ISO to “improve the pixel saturation and produce vivid photographs”. We are not sure how that differs froum current sensor technologies, but we guess we'll find out when the mammoth unit makes it to an actual phone.

The HMX also supports video recording with full field of view at 6K (6016 x 3384 pixels per frame) at 30 fps, so it's good news to videographers too.

Mass production of the sensor is expected to begin by the end of August, so we can expect the new Xiaomi Mi Mix 4 to sport the HMX at its launch, likely taking place in October.

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