A 50MP cellphone camera?

[Jameel Hyder]

Interesting path we are on. Now if the cell phone makers offer RAW with this ... Won't replace the full frame anytime soon but will likely meet the demands of a majority of shooter. Imagine how much of the weight comes off the backpack for long treks.

The First Smartphone Image Sensor With 100% PDAF Coverage Unveiled (petapixel.com)

 

[AlanLichty]

It will be interesting to see how this gets integrated into the end products we will see as end users. Using Apple as an example the image we get is a processed result even when we access the image as a RAW file (iPhone 12 only). The camera actually takes a series of images when you press the shutter and then uses a variety of algorithms to stack them into a single image. There really isn't a direct path from the camera sensor to what we can collect off of the device like we see with RAW on DSLR or mirrorless cameras. Many choices will be in the hands of the cell phone manufacturers as to how they integrate tech like this and offer it up to us. Looks quite interesting from the linked story.

I'm not faulting what the phone camera systems are doing by any means - they are producing some remarkable results for their size. I carry one and use the camera feature all the time. My sole goal when I upgrade my phone is to get camera improvements and/or bandwidth improvements.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Anything you can do with a cell phone could in theory be done in a camera with more space and better lenses.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

The camera makers next frontier is to incorporate the same processing power as the smart phones where they can use similar computational approach.

 

[JimFox]

Of course the problem seems to be the sensor is just too small for 50 mp. It's interesting that I just recently found out that the iphone 12 Pro Max version does have a sensor in it that is 43% bigger (I think it was 43%) then in the rest of the iPhones. So now, that would help.

The camera's in our phones are certainly amazing, and they sure seem to be improving. But I would trade megapixels for greater DR and high ISO IQ.