Sony announces next generation CMOS camera sensor for smartphones

The last time we heard from Sony about new camera sensors was when the Japanese company back in 2010 introduced two CMOS sensors with 8 and 16 megapixels resolution. Those were all back-illuminated Exmor R CMOS sensors and we are guessing the 8 megapixel sensor was used in the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc and probably the iPhone 4S. So far, we have not seen a smartphone from Sony with a 16 megapixel sensor. The only smartphone we know of with this high resolution is the HTC Titan II announced at CES earlier this month. But that model has an aperture of f/2.6 which is a little larger than those Sony can offer.

Sony's announcement today was about the development of a new type of sensor. The company revealed that samples of the first 8 megapixel sensor will be available in March this year.

We are not fond of adding more pixels and decreasing the image sensor size without improving the other features that makes a camera good. And thankfull, Sony has not increased the megapixels to 16, but instead stopped at 13 MP (this time). The lens quality and camera handling are things we would like to see improved before more megapixels are added to a phone.

The breaking news of today is that Sony now has been able to move the previously surrounding circuit section below the actual pixel section and therefore made it possible to have the photosites where the photons (light) are collected stacked closer together.

Today's announcement is not only about pixel density. Sony also introduced something they call RGBW Coding function and HDR Move function.

The RGB Coding feature adds white pixels to the traditional Red-Green-Blue method. The new function allows images to be captured with low noise in low-light conditions. The illustration image of the cake below shows a conventional RGB method and the new RGBW method. The addition of white pixels used to be a problem because it degrades image quality but Sony claims they have solved this now. The advantage with the extra white pixel is that the sensitivity improves.

HDR Movie function is the other new feature Sony has added to their new sensors. HDR = High Dynamic Range. If you do not know what HDR is, you should take a look at the user contributed images over in the Esato forum. As you can see from those images, it is easy to overdo the HDR effect. It will be less contrast and HDR photos will loose image info in the darkest and lightest areas of the image. Very dark parts of an image will be lightened and the lightest parts of the image will be darkened. A common way to produce HDR still images is by taking several images where half of them are very dark and the other half is very light and later merge them together with image editing software. Making HDR images using still images is one thing. Doing it in real time when shooting a video is something completely different. One way is to use two parallel cameras like in this Youtube video or now using the new Sony sensor. 

Sony will have a 8 megapixel 1/4 stacked CMOS sensor without RGBW and HDR available in March and a 13 megapixel 1/3.06 stacked CMOS sensor with RGBW and HDR Movie ready in June 2012. The 1/4 stacked CMOS sensor with RGBW and HDR will be available in August 2012. We do not expect any of these sensors to be shipped in smartphones before next year.

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