The IMX586 from Sony is the world's highest resolution camera camera image sensor

Sony's smartphone business continues to perform poorly, but the company remains the market leader in image sensors. Its latest design, the IMX586, promises a jump in image quality by dramatically increasing the resolution to 48 effective megapixels (8000 x 6000), which according to Sony is the highest number of pixels in the world. # 39; industry.

It's about adding more megapixels – which can be counterproductive, with smaller pixels leading to noisy photos in low light. The 0.8 micron pixels used in this sensor will be the smallest on the market, actually. But Sony says it's going to work around this problem by using a Bayer four-color chart and allowing each pixel to use the signals from the four adjacent pixels, which increases the sensitivity to the equivalent of ## EQU1 ## 39, a 12 megapixel image captured with 1.6 micron pixels.

Sony

Nokia's 808 PureView phones in 2012 at this year's Huawei P20 Pro have experimented similar binning pixel techniques on 40-megapixel or larger sensors, but Sony's IMX586 is likely to be a more common solution. Sony reduces the size to 8mm diagonally, which means that there will be no need for a huge hump, although the lens in front of the sensor of course plays an important role in the ability of the camera to solve an image. The focus is also on producing 48 megapixel usable images rather than the default downsampling – this may not be very useful for everyday shooting, but it should at least allow a better digital zoom.

You can expect to see the IMX586 on smartphones next year; Sony plans to begin shipping samples in September, with a unit price of 3,000 yen ($ 27) each.