“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Old Testament aside, we’re about to see 100MP selfie cameras in our precious smartphones, according to the latest leak from Digital Chat Station. Our Chinese is a bit rusty, so we used the good-ol’ Google Translate to decipher the message. “Illuminate your beauty” sounds great as a PR slogan, right?
The practicality of such a solution is questionable at best. Modern selfie cameras top at around 40-48MP which is more than enough for almost any scenario. With manufacturers struggling to offer a true edge-to-edge display experience it’d be a step back to try and fit an even larger sensor on the front.
However, Samsung has shrunk the size of its 108MP sensors by opting for a slightly smaller pixel size - 0.7μm vs 0.8μm in the previous generation. By doing this, the Korean company was able to reduce the overall size of the sensors by 15%, and also make the new camera modules 10% shorter. Would these 108MP sensors be a good fit for a selfie camera? Probably not.
We’ve seen great selfie cameras with pixel count as small as 8-16MP (Pixel, iPhone), so increasing the pixel count while shrinking the size of the pixels themselves is a bit futile. You’ll end up with really crappy low-light performance selfie cameras, and besides - who would print a poster out of a selfie shot?
Yeah, there’s clever tech that combines multiple pixels into one in a process called pixel binning, but it’s really like going in circles - shrink the pixels and increase the count, then combine them into larger “virtual” pixels. These 100+ MP selfie cameras sound huge on paper and maybe that’s the purpose - a simple PR stunt. Of course, they may turn out to be awesome, who knows. What do you think?
Would you buy a smartphone with a 100MP selfie camera?
Yes! Illuminate my beauty, please!
32.71%
No. Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!
67.29%
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Mariyan, a tech enthusiast with a background in Nuclear Physics and Journalism, brings a unique perspective to PhoneArena. His childhood curiosity for gadgets evolved into a professional passion for technology, leading him to the role of Editor-in-Chief at PCWorld Bulgaria before joining PhoneArena. Mariyan's interests range from mainstream Android and iPhone debates to fringe technologies like graphene batteries and nanotechnology. Off-duty, he enjoys playing his electric guitar, practicing Japanese, and revisiting his love for video games and Haruki Murakami's works.
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