The megapixel war on smartphones continues, and after the Motorola X30 Pro became the first phone to offer a 200-megapixel primary sensor on the back of its body, many phone makers continue to push the benefits of using such cameras, but they ignore its drawbacks, as Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun pointed out in his tweet. The executive also hinted that his own company’s line of smartphones will not be hindered by the same issue.
The revelation that it is unacceptable for a smartphone to wait five seconds to process a picture highlights the price to be paid for using a 200-megapixel camera on a smartphone. In addition to hardware, software, camera applications and the SoC’s ISP play a key role in processing high-resolution images. If the raw data captured by this sensor cannot be processed into an image in a few milliseconds, or worse, in a second or more, it pretty much indicates that the software is simply not ready to support this level of hardware.
Furthermore, if a 200-megapixel smartphone camera takes five seconds to process an entire image, the user holding the camera would have to remain stationary to get satisfactory, or at least acceptable, results. A slight shake here or a bump there will bring blurry images, and quality will continue to degrade dramatically at night as there isn’t enough light for the sensor to process.
Lei believes that the upcoming Xiaomi 12T series will not have this problem, although he did not say how many seconds Xiaomi’s flagship lineup would take to capture a 200-megapixel image. Next year’s Galaxy S23 Ultra is also said to feature Samsung’s own 200-megapixel sensor, so we’ll get to see what improvements will be made in the updated models coming out next year.
Snapdragon 8’s ISP is said to be much improved, potentially helping to process 200-megapixel images significantly faster than Qualcomm’s current generation chip, so hopefully, the upcoming hardware will unlock the actual potential of the “super” sensor.
