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Larger image sensors absorb more light and provide better images, particularly as light intensity decreases. Typically larger sensors also require larger lens providing better optical resolving power or sharper images.
As cameras started proliferating in mobile phones, the industrial design size constraints required that cameras fit within a cube with edge size smaller than 6mm. Such constraint limited the maximal allowable size of the lens and the image sensor.
The size of digital image sensors is commonly defined by the sensor’s diagonal. Since the advent of cameras in mobile phones in early 2000’s and up until 2015, camera phones (and later smartphones) typically incorporated sensors of 6mm or 10mm diagonal (also known as 1/4” and 1/3.2” respectively). To learn more on image sensor optical formats click here. Since 2016, we’ve seen a rapid growth process where the main camera sensor size increases from year-to-year, exceeding 12mm (1/1.28”) in 2020. This trend occurs simultaneously with the appearance and proliferation of multi aperture cameras in smartphones and for similar reasons –significantly improving photographic capabilities. At the same time such cameras necessitated increase in the size of the related optics and we’ve seen camera heights move from 6mm in 2015 to 8.5mm in 2020 enlarging the so called “camera bump”.
The trend of main sensor enlargement is expected to continue into the future, carrying smartphones to sensor sizes previously only allowable in digital still cameras (DSC) or even larger digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras. Both DSCs and DSLRs entertain much larger lens than smartphones and thus are free from such size constraints. Furthermore DSC and DSLR cameras are not required to survive a drop from heights 1.5m which smartphones are required to survive.
Corephotonics has developed, and will launch, a technology which enables cameras with sensors as large as 21mm (4/3”) which comply to smartphone form factor and reliability requirements.
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