NEWS:New OmniVision camera sensor shoots 16MP stills, 4K video

If you haven't heard of OmniVision, you should know make some pretty good camera sensors (the one in the iPhone 4, for example). Today they outed the OV16820, a 16MP sensor intended for use in digital cameras and the high-end smartphones

The sensor measures 1/2.3" and uses OmniVision's OmniBSI-2 technology with 1.34 micro pixel pitch. It's capable of outputting 16MP (4608 x 3456) photos at 30fps in burst mode and 4K2K (3840 x 2160, four times the resolution of 1080p) video at 60fps.

The new OmniVision sensor also supports on-chip pixel binning (2x2 and 3x3) and resampling. Pixel binning is a popular way to improve quality when the needed resolution is lower than the sensor resolution (so, it will work for 1080p and 720p, videos but not 4K2K).

All this sounds pretty awesome - burst shot mode is becoming more important (as the HTC One phones and Samsung Galaxy S III will tell you) - and 16MP cameraphones are already on the market (HTC Titan II).

As for the 4K2K video, it's a nice dream but we don't think we'll see it in a phone soon - processing four times as many pixels as FullHD (especially at 60fps) is too much burden even for the current smartphone chipsets.

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