Many people with smart phones will welcome the 8mm 8 megapixel CMOS imager, the S5K3H2, that is being showcased at Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2011. It sports 1.4micron backside-illuminated pixel technology for great excellent shooting in low light conditions. This will provide high quality imaging in smart phones and camcorders. Soon we may use our smart phones in the same way as point-and-shoot cameras, and the low-light-sensitivity will add to the growing reasons to merely carry a phone instead of lugging around a heavy, albeit high quality, DSLR. The best images come at 15frames per second, but 1080p video looks great at 30fps. The S5K3H2 also offers video at 720p with 60fps and VGA resolution which is up to 800 x 600 for 120 fps slow motion playback. That’s actually better than a lot of standalone camcorders can do now.
All this processing power comes at a small cost to the life of the phone’s battery which is only 1.2V. Even so, we’re still hoping that many phone designs will leave space for this high quality CMOS imager. It has a rather small footprint of only 8mm by 8mm so most camera bodies should be able to house the imager with room to spare. Samsung is sure to add the pixel packing S5K3H2 to its up-and-comingmobile phones, which means that the demise of standalone camcorders may be coming sooner than we think!
