With users expecting better and better photography from their cutting-edge smartphones, companies have been putting some of their best efforts into pushing the limits of what tiny camera sensors can do. Some are even expanding on their camera set-ups with sensors geared towards augmented reality, like Apple’s LiDAR. In a news post, Samsung’s Yongin Park, Head of Sensor Business Team, announced the South Korean company’s plans to deliver small camera sensors capable of matching and exceeding the resolution of the human eye, said to be around 500 megapixels.Early this year, we took a closer look at the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and its impressive 108MP sensor, which implements what Samsung calls ‘Nonacell technology,’ that dramatically increases the amount of light absorption pixels are capable of.

Samsung notes that the jump to 108 megapixels was a mere six months after the company’s industry-first 64MP sensor. In 2019, Samsung’s engineers were also able to introduce image sensors based on 0.7 micrometre pixels, while the industry considered 0.8 the smallest possible size pixels could be reduced to.

Yongin Park continues that the company isn’t simply developing image sensors, but is looking into new technology that can register smells and tastes, and even go beyond the human senses, to eventually become integral parts of our daily lives. As sensors capable of perceiving ultraviolet light can be useful for diagnosing skin cancer by capturing skin cancer cells in different colors than healthy ones, and infrared sensors can be used for improving quality control in agriculture and other industries, having such sensors on consumer smartphones may prove surprisingly useful.

Samsung concludes that even though image sensors have been mostly applied to smartphones, they may expand to quickly-growing fields such as autonomous vehicles, IoT (Internet of Things) and drones. Open to the possibilities in pixel technologies, Samsung promises to continue leading the small-pixel, high-resolution sensor trends for years to come.