When you say Sony imaging, you’d tend to think of their top-of-the-line α series digital cameras though their smartphone line of Exmor sensors does garner some attention every now and then. Mainly that’s due to the Japanese company having great technology but bad implementation – awkwardly seen on their flailing flagship smartphones.
The just announced sensor has Sony boasting about its 22.5-megapixel lens that comes feature-packed with an on-chip processor for auto-focus and image stabilisation. That isn’t all, as the Sony Exmor RS CMOS sensor will also be 1/0.2-inches smaller than its predecessor, now listed at 1/2.6-inches.
It’ll also have a 1.0µm pixel size but Sony claims there’s nothing to worry about because they’ve used a special manufacturing technology that allows them to tweak light utilisation efficiency and improved the design of the circuit to maximise noise elimination.
We’ll have to see how well this works in practice but knowing Sony, we’re not sure what to think just yet. In short, using a smaller sensor means that the pixel size will “suffer” to compensate for the form factor.
Other add-ons also include a 3-axis video stabilisation that we talked about earlier but since it’s internal, there won’t be a need for accompanying modules like you see on the LG G4; that uses a Sony camera.
We’re very familiar with Sony’s SteadyShot feature and we don’t expect them to mess up their image stabilisation feature though they’ve peaked our interest to see how much better they can improve it.
Rumours indicate that Samsung will employ Sony for their upcoming flagships as they’ve done in the past and you can bet that other manufacturers are thinking of putting Sony’s IMX318 sensor on their upcoming devices.
Repeated many times over, the equipment helps only so much as processing plays a big part too. Will Sony work on their image processing? Fingers crossed.
While waiting, do check out our camera comparison and 4K video comparison to see how Sony’s current flagship sensor performs.
