Qualcomm recently announced that most of its new chipsets support cameras with up to 192 megapixel sensors, as part of a specs sheet update. That got a lot of hearts racing about the possibility of such a smartphone camera coming this year. And while the company says that 192MP cameras are not coming anytime soon, there will be other breakthroughs this year.
“There are no 192 megapixel sensors available right now. I think, pretty much in the market today, the most common large megapixel sensor is the 48 megapixels. There are more that will be coming out later this year at 64 megapixels. And by the end of the year, we should be touching over 100 megapixels from a couple of the sensor providers,” Heape told us on the phone call.
Qualcomm believes that more and more manufacturers will unlock the potential of the latest Snapdragon chipsets, its ISP and the DSP, to bring super-high-res cameras to smartphones. That could be at the expense of increased shutter lag and low frame rates in the viewfinder.
It must be noted that Qualcomm says the ISP in the Snapdragon chipsets has always been able to capture images up to 192 megapixels in resolution, but SoC is capped to 30 frames per second, for a smoother and better user experience.
