The world’s largest supplier of mobile camera sensors won’t sit still while Samsung is eating its lunch with the rumored second generation “Bright Night” 108MP sensor that is expected to make a cameo in the Galaxy S11 series.

After the restrictions that the US placed on Google for its Android exports to Huawei, companies like OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi sensed an opening and are working hard to take advantage of the market vacuum by outdoing themselves with new mobile technologies and eye-catchy designs.

The sensors built on the technology will still use the Quad Bayer filter array, and allow for very high resolutions that have pixel-binning advantages like merging the brightness and color information from multiple dots into one super pixel. 

Sony 2×2 on-chip lens (OCL) sensors

By moving from individual lense array for each pixel to ones that encompass more pixels at once, Sony has managed to eliminate the slight differences in light sensitivity between the individual pixels, thus improving focus and HDR performance, as well as reducing noise potential in certain scenarios.

All in all, next year is shaping up to be the most exciting for smartphone cameras in a good while, as the improvements will actually be on the hardware and sensor side of things, too. In the past couple of years companies like Google, Apple and Samsung focused mainly on software trickery and sensor count increases when it comes to improvements in the photographic department, but 2020 will take us in a whole different (and exciting) direction.