Smartphone manufacturers rely on many other companies because they can’t produce all the component by themselves. Most of the OEMs are using the camera sensor from Sony, Samsung, or Omnivision. The Smartphone industry is using the higher megapixel camera from the last couple of months. Most of the budget and premium smartphone from Chinese brand is launching smartphones with 48MP camera.
Sony was one of the first to introduce a 48MP IMX586 sensor followed by the Samsung with its 48MP Samsung GM1 sensor. Later of Samsung launched two new sensors Samsung GM2 48MP sensor and Samsung GW1 64MP sensor. Ominivision is finally following the trend by launch it’s true 48MP OV48B sensor.
The OV48B is the first 48MP sensor from the company that features 0.8-micron pixel size and has some features like digital crop zoom, both DPHY and CPHY MIPI interfaces. The new camera sensor is versatile and can be used as the rear primary camera, Wide-Angle camera or Telephoto sensor.
The camera sensor can also produce rich photos in night photography by using Pixel binning technology to generate 12MP output. It also includes 2×2 microlens PDAF for low-light focusing.
OmniVision OV48B generates an output of 48MP and 12MP using Pixel Binning for images for the video part it generates an output of 4K @60fps, 2K @60fps, 1080p @240fps, and 720p @480fps.
OmniVision camera sensors are mostly used by the Chinese smartphone manufacturer for their budget smartphones. We have seen the Omnivision sensor in Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1, Redmi Note 7, Moto G4 Plus. The sensor expected to be available in the market from Q4 2019.