Image sensor provides high dynamic range for smartphones

This sensor also offers a staggered HDR option with on-chip combination, providing smartphone designers with the maximum flexibility to select the best HDR method for a given scene.

“The combination of high resolution, large pixel size and high dynamic range is essential to providing the image quality required by flagship mobile phone designers for features such as night mode,” said Arun Jayaseelan, Staff Marketing Manager at OmniVision. “The OV48C is the only flagship mobile image sensor in the industry to offer the combination of high 48MP resolution, a large 1.2 micron pixel, high speed, and on-chip high dynamic range, which provides superior SNR, unparallelled low light performance and high quality 4K video.”

Built on OmniVision’s PureCel Plus stacked die technology, this 1/1.3” optical format sensor provides still image capture and video performance for flagship smartphones. The OV48C also integrates an on-chip, four-cell colour filter array and hardware remosaic, which provides high quality, 48MP Bayer output, or 8K video, in real time.

In low light conditions, this sensor can use near-pixel binning to output a 12MP image for 4K2K video with four times the sensitivity, yielding a 2.4 micron-equivalent performance. In either case, the OV48C can consistently capture the quality images without motion blur, as well as enabling digital crop zoom with 12MP resolution and fast mode switch.

Additionally, this sensor offers a wide range of features, including digital crop zoom and a CPHY interface, making it ideal for main, rear-facing cameras in multicamera configurations. The OV48C also uses 4C Half Shield phase detection for fast autofocus support.

Output formats include 48MP at 15 frames per second (fps), 12MP with four-cell binning at 60 fps, and 4K2K video at 60fps with the extra pixels needed for electronic image stabilisation. This sensor also offers 1080p video with slow motion support at 240fps, as well as 720p at 360fps.