The smartphone division of Sony has continued to perform in an unimpressive manner, but the company remains the market leader regarding image sensors. The IMX586, with their latest stacked CMOS design, comes up with the promise of leaping regarding the image quality by bringing forth a dramatic increase in the resolution to 48 megapixels, which the company terms it as the highest pixel count in the whole industry.
Quality of image is not just about adding up more megapixels. They are using 0.8-micron pixels in the sensor, which is going to be the smallest on the market. Still, Sony believes that they would make up for this through the usage of a quad Bayer color filter array and hence allowing each pixel to use up signals from the four pixels that are adjacent to one another. Those are supposed to raise the sensitivity of light to be equal to that of an image of 12-megapixel having 1.6-micron pixels.
Phones like the 808 Purview from Nokia in 2012 to the one which Huawei brought about through their P20 Pro this year, all have experimented with similar kind of techniques. Now, the IMX586 from Sony would be most probably, more of a kind of mainstream solution. The size is being kept down to a mere 8mm in diagonal, which means a huge camera bump will not be required, through the lens in the front side of the sensor will play a big role in the ability of the camera to get the image resolved.
They are focused upon producing usable images of 48-megapixel than get it downsampled by default. This might not be a very useful thing while taking snaps at a regular basis but still it would at least allow a far better digital zoom.
The IMX 586 can be expected to come up on smartphones in 2019. The company has plans to get the samples shipped in September this year, having a price per unit of 3000 yen each.
