With the launch of this year’s Galaxy S flagships only a number of days away, it’s rather exciting to see what Samsung has in store with its latest devices, especially in terms of overall performance, as well as camera quality. It’s highly expected that the S23 series will feature the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, as well as major camera hardware upgrades.
To be more specific, it’s speculated that the upgrades will come by way of Samsung’s latest mobile camera sensor, the ISOCELL HP2. The company has lately been promoting the HP2, and given that its reveal falls almost around the same time as Samsung Unpacked 2023, there’s little doubt that we’ll see some improvements with camera performance on the S23 series over last year’s S22 handsets. According to JoonSeo Yim, Executive Vice President of Sensor Business Team at Samsung Electronics:
“The Samsung ISOCELL HP2 harnesses Samsung’s high-resolution image sensor technologies and know-how at the cutting edge for epic details. Our leadership comes from innovative pixel technologies that allow our sensors to go beyond the number and size of pixels. We will continue to open new horizons and solidify our presence in the expanding ultra-high-resolution sensor market.”
What makes the HP2 unique is its 200-megapixel resolution, a trait not often seen on most flagship smartphones. The ISOCELL HP2 features over 200-million 0.6-micrometer (μm) pixels in a 1/1.3-inch optical format, a sensor size that is usually seen in 108MP main smartphone cameras. This means that Samsung was able to design the new sensor without drastically increasing its actual physical size.
The sensor also uses pixel-binning technology – according to Samsung, the HP2 utilizes Tetra2pixel, which essentially lets it adapt to varying lighting levels. When used in darker environments with low lighting for example, the sensor transforms either into a 1.2μm 50MP or 2.4μm 12.5MP image sensor by binding four to 16 neighboring pixels. For filming 8K video at 33MP, the HP2 switches to a 1.2μm 50MP mode to reduce cropping.
Of course, pixel binning isn’t anything new, and has been used by manufacturers such as Apple, Google, and even OnePlus on some of their smartphone cameras. It’s been the trend lately, however, and depending on how you like your photos, has proved to be popular with a lot of the online tech crowd.
As for HDR, Samsung has added the DSG feature in 50MP mode, which sets two separate conversion values to the analog signal received at the pixel level. There’s also Smart-ISO Pro, which merges different levels of ISO readouts from a single exposure, enabling the camera to take 12.5MP images and 4K at 60fps video in HDR.
As such, whether or not the new hardware can pull all of this off in actual usage remains to be seen, at least until we get a unit for hands-on testing. With that said however, we’ve no doubt seen an improvement with the imaging quality in Samsung flagships for the past few years, giving as an idea of what to expect this time around.
