Sony's new camera sensor can shoot stunning slow motion videos, four times faster than before

We all know that slow motion can make everything look epic. That's not an opinion, it's a fact, and you know it. But shooting slow-mo videos with your smartphone can prove quite challenging. Smartphones are just not designed with high-speed video capturing in mind, and the latest flagships, such as the iPhone 7 Plus, can achieve speed of merely 240 frames per second.

Well, Sony is here to change that. The company has been supplying camera modules for a variety of smartphone manufacturer for years and it's widely regarded as one of the best camera makers in the industry, so it's only natural for it to try and one-up itself and the competition. Said “one-up” comes in the form of a new CMOS sensor that packs its own dedicated DRAM.

Up until now, the conventional CMOS sensors consisted of two layers – one being the image sensor itself, and the other being a circuit section for processing the signals that the image sensor produces. Now Sony added a third component, creating the industry's first 3-layer stacked CMOS sensor, packing its own DRAM. The added memory allows Sony's new sensor to process a still image of 19.3 MP in only 1/120 of a second. That's approximately four times faster than Sony's previous model with the same pixel count. The higher speed of reading each pixel line should result in less distortion when taking photos of fast moving objects.