At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on Sunday, Sony announced a new mobile smartphone camera sensor that’s capable of some pretty impressive slow motion video.
It’s a 3-layer stacked CMOS sensor, which comprises of a DRAM layer for capturing ‘still images of fast-moving subjects with minimal focal plane distortion’ and 2-layer back-illuminated stacked CMOS sensors. In laymans terms, you’ll be able to shoot video at an impressive 1,000 fps at 1920×1080 (FullHD) resolution.
In practical terms the sensor can capture a 19.3MP shot in 4:3 Aspect Ratio or 17.1MP in 16:9 in only 1/120th of a second – that’s fast, in fact 4x faster than other sensors on the market. If 4K video is important to you, you can also capture 4K video in 60FPS as well. It certainly looks impressive from the demo video Sony released:
Where we’ll see the new sensor, or what the model of the sensor is hasn’t been announced as yet but Sony is a major global supplier of mobile camera phone sensors so it’s possible it could end up anywhere. We’ll have to wait and see which phone launches with the sensor, but for anyone who loves slow-mo video this is a big step forward.
Looks really cool!