In recent days in the Smartphone world, one of the most important things in a smartphone is its camera. Lots of smartphone manufacturers are in a race of increasing the megapixels of their mobile cameras. But deep down we all know the thing which is important than the megapixels is the camera sensor. If the sensor is not good enough, then the camera will degrade its image quality in spite of having a higher number of megapixels. That’s why 21 MP in DSLR shows greater results than a 64MP smartphone camera. Because of the sensor size and quality, these two things matter mainly.
In terms of the mobile camera sensor, Samsung and Sony are like the table-toppers. Most of the smartphone manufacturers all over the globe use the camera sensor of either Samsung or Sony. According to a recent report, Samsung has claimed the second spot in the Smartphone Camera sensors. This South-Korean tech giant makes its own ISOCELL branded camera sensors for smartphones and is also known for actively competing with Sony in the segment. Other than this, Sony has claimed the first position and Omnivision ranked third in the H1 2020 (Strategy Analytics reports).
“THE IMAGE SENSOR MARKET GROWTH WAS SLOWED BY THE IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC ON THE OVERALL SMARTPHONE MARKET. HOWEVER, THE MOMENTUM AROUND HIGH PIXEL SENSORS AND THE USE OF MULTIPLE CAMERAS IN SMARTPHONES IS EXPECTED TO SHAPE A STRONG GROWTH PATH FOR THE IMAGE SENSOR MARKET IN THE SECOND HALF OF 2020”, says Stephen Entwistle who is the Vice President of the Strategic Technologies Practice at Strategy Analytics.
If we talk about the revenues of the existing companies, then we find that during the first half of 2020, Sony’s revenue share was a massive 44%. After that, Samsung has managed to have a 32% revenue share of the market whereas OmniVision’s revenue share was 9%. All of these happened because of those multi-camera smartphones. Because of the high demand, the mobile camera sensor market managed to grow by 15%.
Samsung has launched its 48-megapixel, 64-megapixel sensors back in 2019. Now they are making a massive 108-megapixel camera sensor. The Mi 10T Pro will sport the 108MP primary camera sensor. Samsung is using these camera sensors (ISOCELL HM1, ISOCELL HMX) in their own smartphones as well as the other smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi. But the journey has a long way to go as Samsung is planning to introduce 150-megapixel, 250-megapixel, and even 600-megapixel sensors for smartphones as well as the automotive industry in the future.
