Just a couple of days after Xiaomi launched its CC9 smartphone with a 108MP camera, there’s fresh rumours this weekend Samsung’s about to do the same thing with the upcoming Galaxy S11.
The rumours come from Samsung itself, with an updated app referring to the company’s new 108MP ISOCELL Bright HMX camera sensor. It’s not 100% clear whether this will be in the Galaxy S11, but it seems likely – why put a flagship camera sensor in anything less?
It’s the same sensor Xiaomi used, in fact, but Samsung using it in one of its own-branded devices is bigger news. XDA Developers found the hint in the new Samsung Camera app which shipped with the One UI beta that shipped earlier this week.
The new app supports resolutions up to 12,000 x 9,000 which is a total of 108,000,000 pixels or … 108MP.
While there’s noting in the app to confirm that the sensor will be found in the Galaxy S11 range, rumours do suggest this is the case, with a 5x optical zoom lens and 108MP primary sensor for regular and wide-angle photos.
What gives these rumours credence? Well, little point building the software for hardware that you won’t use, Samsung’s already got the sensor technology built and in production, and it does have the Galaxy S11 coming in a couple of months.
Reality is we won’t likely see 108MP photos, as the primary use for a sensor this large is to drag in more light and use pixel binning technology to brighten up the captured image at a more sensible 27MP.
It’s trite to say, but I guess we’ll know the details (or more of them) in a couple of months leading up to the anticipated February launch date.
