Xiaomi and Samsung are partnering to launch a 100MP smartphone camera.

Xiaomi announced at its global event in Beijing, China that its next smartphone under the Redmi moniker would feature a 64-megapixel sensor. While that was already in the pipeline, Xiaomi went one step further and added that it would also introduce a smartphone featuring a 100-megapixel sensor, later this year.

Xiaomi has revealed that it will not only use the 64MP sensor in an upcoming Redmi phone but that a future phone will pack a 108MP (oddly billed as 100MP) “ultra-clear” Samsung ISOCELL camera sensor. That’s a 12,032 x 9,024 image, folks. This is the kind of resolution you typically expect from medium format cameras, not the phone in your pocket.

Standard photographs at the highest setting from a sensor with 100 million pixels would likely range around the 20.5-megapixel mark, which is what Sony and Samsung’s sensors of yore had produced already, albeit without pixel binning. The standard JPEG file produced from a sensor ranges around the 16-megapixel mark, which is deemed ideal for present computing standards while accounting for sensor buffer (RAM for cameras), ISP capability, storage size and speed, phone RAM, internet bandwidth and image compression standards. Given that such files can already produce rather brilliant photographs when the intelligent algorithms get the settings correct, your naked eye will likely not see a massive difference with the 100-megapixel photographs.

As Heape had explained, the presence of a zero shutter lag buffer memory means that imaging standards need to be capped at a certain point, and simply increasing the megapixel count really makes no sense. You need to account for frame rates in order to put all of this in a production phone, and unfortunately, even this 100-megapixel sensor would be capped by these engineering limitations