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Samsung Doubles Down in Image Sensors
 
Samsung has the 2nd largest market share in the almost $21b image sensor market and continues to push product limits.  In August 2019 Samsung released the first image sensor (IOSCELL™) with over 100m pixels, used in over 35 smartphone models by Samsung alone, plus Xiaomi, Realme, Motorola, Honor, Infinix and vivo. Sony and others have released CIS sensors with higher pixel counts (Sony – 127MP), Samsung announced ISOCELL HP1, a 200MP image senor and the ISOCELL GN5, a 50MP version with high speed auto-focus.  The new sensors use a process that Samsung calls Chameleon Cell, which senses the lighting environment and can combine between 4 and 16 adjacent pixels to gather more light in low light environments.  If light is sufficient, all 200 0.64um pixels are used individually.  The sensor is 1” x 1.22” slightly smaller than the 1” x 1.33” 108MP ISOCELL HM3 and can shoot 8K video at 30 frames/second and 4K video at 120 fps.  
 
The Galaxy S22 series, due out in January 2022 should be the first to use the new sensor, which will undoubtedly be followed by high pixel count versions from Sony and others.