Samsung Galaxy S11 and S11+'s main 108MP main camera to come with a 9-to-1 Bayer sensor

A slew of leaks has all but confirmed that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S11 would debut with a stunning 108-megapixel sensor, and not just the 108-megapixel sensor that Samsung has been selling to Xiaomi. As WhatMobile noted in a previous post, it will be a custom-designed lens that addresses the shortcomings that plague the vanilla ISOCELL Bright sensor. The source of this leak was the Twitter account @Universelce, and the same source now reports that this custom-made sensor 108-megapixel will feature 9-to-1 Bayer filter tech.

Bayer filters or sensors on Samsung Galaxy S11+ are what give otherwise greyscale digital images their color. They’re a mosaic of the three primary colors, and each unit of the RGB tile covers up a bunch of pixels. Now the most common Bayer filter array has a 4X4 pattern, called the Quad Bayer. The pixel size itself might vary, but a Quad-Bayer serves to preserve the sharpness of the image.

This is the real Galaxy S11+ camera. On the left is the ultra-wide-angle, main camera, and periscope zoom lens. I don't know the exact distribution on the right. It is expected to include flash and ToF. pic.twitter.com/98exPMSqgf

— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) December 16, 2019

The larger the pixel size, the higher resolution the image will have. And the pixel size this 9-by-1 sensor promises is the biggest you’ll find on any smartphone. Where most Quad-Bayer-featuring sensors are limited to 1.6 µm, the units of Samsung’s 9X1 Bayer sensor will take up pixels with the dimensions of 2.4 µm, which should translate into a much sharper image.

This pixel size will be achieved by binning nine pixels into one, by something called pixel-binning. So if you crunch the numbers, 108 million pixels on Samsung S11 Plus and S11 will be binned into 12 million pixels, each of them 2.4 microns. But it doesn’t just end there, 9-by-1 binning also means there will be less noise, less information lost, which makes for better low-light shots.

@Universelce also showcased a render of this camera system in one of his tweets. He claims that the lens setup pictured above, features an ultrawide-angle lens, and a periscope lens, in addition to the custom 108-megapixel sensor. The Samsung S11+ logo hides the rest of it but as per the leak, underneath it sits a flash and a ToF sensor. If the hype is anything to go by, the Samsung Galaxy S11 series may well be the best smartphone camera to date.