Hi
First of all, I didn’t catch up on all the 100 posts above mine, I just read the first 30, so sorry if my question was already answered.
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What I’m interested in is how the sensor on the old camera module was built.
Every digital camera has a bayer filter in it that composes each pixel of four different subpixels, two green ones and one red and blue respectively. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Bayer_pattern_on_sensor.svg/1200px-Bayer_pattern_on_sensor.svg.png
Since the old camera also had 12MP, its built-in bayer filter must have had 48 “Mega-Subpixels” as well.
So apart from the 13% sensor size enlargement (which is one of the most important factors of image quality. Just a reminder: FullHD has a resution of 2MP and 4K has 8MP, so everything above that is completely unnecessary on a phone anyways), the number of subpixels on the bayer filter apparently hasn’t changed at all.
The only thing that has changed is that FP now shouts out the number of subpixels in a confusing way so that people think that they’re actually getting 48MP photos (which again, the resolution would be rediculously unnecessary for a phone camera, but explain that to your average “bigger is better” customer).
I thought the camera modules were a disappointment and just marketing from the minute I saw the introduction video (back then I didn’t even know that the 48MP weren’t real. It’s just that nobody who uses a phone camera would ever need a 48MP photo).
This is just one of a couple of examples I’ve noticed in the past year or two of FP being less responsible and transparent and more stupidly marketing oriented. I’m sad to see that.
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The pixels are bigger, and there are more pixels, so the overall sensor is almost twice as big on the specification comparison. In fact it is nearly as big as the High-Q camera - smaller diagonal, but higher aspect ratio, so the long dimension is bigger on Camera Module 3 and the short dimension is bigger on High-Q camera.
This brings bigger design questions in the optics modules, to make use of that larger sensor area might mean a longer optical train - There is a bit of a thread here. @r.w.bowman any thoughts?
Of course, one could just keep the same optical train and then only use the central part of the sensor. Camera V1, also had 1.4µm pixels and gave 5MP which is still probably more than the actual optical resolution of the system. With fewer, bigger, pixels than V2, and a newer sensor design one would hope that the noise is quite a bit better. By cropping we could also use more of the useful optical image area with a nearly square crop to 3.68mm wide (width of image circle designed for the V2 camera) by 3.63mm high (limited by the height of the V3 camera), which gives nearly 7MP. Having significantly more pixels than needed for the optical resolution would just bloat the image sizes.
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