Sony announces 22.5 megapixel IMX318 camera sensor

Sony has announced a new camera sensor that will soon hit the market, and it’s pretty impressive on paper. The company is already the leader in mobile camera sensors, so this new one should be just as great and it’s likely that many manufacturers will adopt it for their high end devices.

The Sony IMX318 is a stacked CMOS image sensor packed with features. It features a 1.0μm pixel size, which makes the sensor smaller than its 20MP predecessor despite having more pixels. However, Sony claims this has not reduced effectiveness in low light.

The sensor also features hybrid autofocus, which combines image plane phase detection AF and contrast detection AF to achieve focus times as fast as 0.03 seconds, or even 0.017 seconds when shooting 60 FPS video.

The sensor also supports 3 axis image stabilization for video, using the built-in hyro to stabilize 4K video pretty impressively. The processing hardware is inside the image sensor, so it won’t have to use the device’s processor to achieve stabilization.

The shipment date for this sensor will be May of 2016, and samples will cost 2,000 yen, or $17.55 USD. Hopefully we’ll start seeing the sensor in phones late 2016, because it looks quite impressive.

source: androidandme