Up to 100mm²: a short history of great phone camera sensors

Samsung presented its HN2 sensor for phones on Tuesday. It has an area of ​​approximately 98 square millimeters, making it the largest to date. The trend of larger camera sensors for phones has been around for a few years now and seems unstoppable.

Maybe I should have had coffee first, I thought. It was Monday morning, February 27, 2012, almost nine years ago and the Mobile World Congress telecom fair was to start that morning in Barcelona. A message had popped into my mailbox that I was sure couldn’t be right. It read: “The Nokia 808 PureView has a large 41-megapixel sensor with a Carl Zeiss lens and a new oversampling technique.” Until then, phone cameras didn’t go beyond 12 megapixels. Nokia must have meant ’14 megapixel’?