In mobile phone press conferences, cameras always occupy a lot of space. "1/1.56 inch, 1/2 inch" are all familiar expressions, but in fact, "1/XX inch" is not intuitive, which makes it difficult to feel the area difference between CMOS.
Therefore, this paper lists and calculates the actual area of common CMOS sizes, so that we can visually compare the actual area gap of CMOS in different ages and different positioning. It is better to look at the watch than to say a thousand words:
Comparison Diagram of Mainstream CMOS Sizes ↑
remarks:
"1/XX inch" refers to the length of CMOS sensor diagonal;
The unit pixel size refers to the length or width of the pixel, and the unit is micrometer (μ m); 1000,000μm=1m；
The approximate area of the sensor can be calculated by "Number of pixels x area per pixel (product of size per pixel)".
Mainstream CMOS size comparison line diagram ↑
The "1/XX inch" system is too old, which may cause people to ignore many "cold knowledge":
People mistakenly thought that from 1/2.3 inch to 1/2 inch was a huge progress, but in fact, the area only increased by 5%;
Eight years after the development of mobile phone photography, the flagship mainstream IMX766 is three times the size of IMX214 in 2014, but only half the size of GN2;
In the six years from 2014 to 2019, the area of mainstream CMOS increased by 81% (IMX586 is 1.8 times of IMX214);
In the four years from 2019 to 2022, the area of mainstream CMOS will increase by 63% (IMX776 is 1.6 times of IMX586);
The year with the largest increase in CMOS area is 2021. At the beginning of the year, there is Xiaomi 11 Ultra GN2, followed by Sharp R6 with an inch bottom and Leica Leitz 1, a sister machine;
In 2018, it jumped from 1/2.55 and 1/2.3 inch to 1/1.7 inch; In 2019, 1/1.3-inch HMX appeared, and then the mainstream flagship entered the toothpaste stage. 1/1.56-inch IMX766 conquered the city, and it was almost 3 years old;
By the way, the Nokia 808 PureView with 41.3 million pixels, 1.4 μ m, 1/1.2 inch sensor is the phone of 2012.
Sensor difference between mobile phone and camera ↑
The concept of "1/XX inch" has been made very easy to understand in the article of @ Camera Notebook et on May 11. Here is a brief summary and a direct conclusion:
"1/XX inch" is a traditional unit, which was first used to indicate the size of the camera vacuum tube of the television camera; The statement that "1/XX inch is half of the circumference of the image sensor" on the network is incorrect;
The "inch" here is not the common "1 inch=25.4mm", but will swing between 1 inch=16mm and 18mm. At 1/2.3 inch and below, "per inch" corresponds to 18 mm, and from 1/2 inch, it corresponds to 16 mm;
Source ↑ @ Edclub
But just like the QWERTY keyboard layout that is now popular all over the world, although they have not adapted to modern use scenarios for a long time, they have been "making mistakes" because of inertia. You can understand why Jobs hated traditional keyboards (of course, he mainly wanted to simplify traditional keyboards rather than innovate the layout of keys).
