Late last year, Samsung announced the ISOCELL HP1, a new 200MP image sensor capable of ultra-high resolution mobile photography. While it hasn’t actually made it to a smartphone just yet, Samsung did take it for a spin to take pictures of perhaps what we all love to take photos of: cats.
Because there’s no smartphone with the 200MP sensor just yet, Samsung ended up using it with a test board for this project. Furthermore, Samsung wants us to know that the image sensor is still under development with the camera module not optimised too. Nevertheless, Samsung still wanted to take that giant 200MP picture of a cat, mostly because they wanted a moving and popular photography subject.
“Choosing a cat as our subject was a difficult decision. It gave us a lot of obstacles to overcome, such as capturing such an active subject with a test board. However, the team concluded that the subject should be something that would show off a high level of detail and that was a popular photography subject at the same time,” – Minhyuk Lee, Samsung engineer
Samsung had to figure out a number of things first before taking the picture. This included calculating the different number of variables and building a custom adapter to attach various DSLR camera lenses to its test board. However, they ended up using the smartphone camera module without any additional aids, mostly because they wanted to capture the cat the same way most smartphone users will. They then had to keep double checking their settings such as the exposure and focus. The cat had to cooperate too; Samsung had to approach the cat in a number of different ways to take multiple images of the cat.
Once that was done, the next challenge was perhaps just as hard. Samsung decided to print out the giant 200MP picture onto twelve different 2.3m long pieces of fabric, and then stitched it all together for perhaps the largest billboard of a cat we’ve seen in a while, measuring 28m wide and 22m tall. They had to get a truck to move all of the rolls of fabric and unraveled it onto the side of a building with the help of a crane. If you want to see the whole process of how Samsung took that giant picture of their cat, you can watch their full video of it below:
As for when you and I can replicate Samsung in taking 200MP pictures of our cat, well that remains to be seen for now. There’s been some rumours swirling around now that Motorola are set to launch a smartphone with the 200MP camera for some time now. The device, codenamed Frontier, has already been teased too it seems by Lenovo on Weibo, with Lenovo’s general manager posting an image of a giant camera module that mentions 200MP too. It’s set to come out some time in July, so we’ll have to wait till then at least to take ultra high resolution images of our cat too.
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