Samsung, famed for its high-quality ‘ISOCELL’ smartphone camera sensors, is about to raise the bar even higher with a new technology promising more accurate color reproduction and superior low-light performance and it could end up in the next Galaxy smartphone.
Samsung claims the technology will provide a 15 percent improvement in light sensitivity and will enable physically smaller pixels to be made without loss in performance, paving the way for higher-resolution cameras with more than 20 megapixels.
Dubbed ‘ISOCELL Plus’, the new sensors build on Samsung’s existing ISOCELL technology, introduced in 2013 and still in use in the current Galaxy S9 flagship.
ISOCELL improves picture quality by placing a metal grid between the sensor’s pixels which prevents light scattering from one pixel to the next. Each pixel is topped with a different colored filter, enabling it to gather red, green or blue light depending on the color of that filter. Because neighboring pixels are configured to capture different colored light, any crosstalk between pixels will result in muddying of the obtained color information.
ISOCELL also improves the sensor’s overall sensitivity to light by increasing the amount of light each pixel can absorb before becoming overwhelmed.
The new ISOCELL Plus technology replaces the metal grid of the standard ISOCELL design with a new material developed by Fujifilm, a brand well-respected for its stand-alone cameras. The new material achieves better results by minimizing some unwanted side-effects of the original metal formulation which is prone to unintentionally reflecting or absorbing incoming light, thereby reducing measurement accuracy.
There’s no word yet on which camera devices will be first to receive the new sensors, but competition is fierce among smartphone flagships so we shouldn’t expect Samsung to wait too long.
See Samsung’s press release for full details.
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