First phone with 48MP camera also has the trendy hole-in-display design
Phone makers are running out of marketing terms to call their strategies for achieving high screen-to-body ratios, and Honor is the latest example. After calling its notch-ed phones FullView, what do you call an "all-screen" phone that only has a hole pierced in the display for the selfie camera?
All View, of course, and that is exactly what the new Honor View 20 apparently carries, judging from the presentation slide above. We kid, it's still FullView, but the 3.0 version, just like Samsung calls it an Infinity-O design.
That's not even the unique feature of the View 20, since Samsung outed the A8s before it today. The Honor View 20 will carry another "first" on its belt, and it is the first phone with a 48MP camera on the back. Well, unless Xiaomi releases its own take on the 48MP gravy train before it.
Yes, you read that right, after the 40MP sensors of the P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro, we now have a 48MP phone with Sony's newest IMX586 sensor. If you think 48MP is overkill, the sensor actually allows 4-in-1 pixel-binning, effectively producing 12MP photos. These should have collected an amount of light equivalent to hearty 1.6-micron pixels, despite that the giant 1/2-inch sensor carries a 0.8-micron pixel size.
As for the rest of the specs, they are what can be expected from a flagship of a Huawei offshoot brand. The View 20 will carry the newest 7nm Kirin 980 chipset that has dual AI co-processors for the ultimate in auto HDR photography. The company claims that the new sensor/processor combo can produce results as if from a single-lens reflex camera but we'll reserve judgment for the retail unit, not for the prototype camera samples below.
The funny part is that Honor is so certain in this camera's virtues that it is keeping it single at the back, no telephoto or wide-angle sidekicks here. The View 20 will be officially unveiled on December 26, and its global rollout will begin with a January 22 event in Paris, so there is still some time for Xiaomi to beat it to the 48MP punch.
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