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Sony's Latest Smartphone Camera Sensor Can Shoot At 1,000fps (theverge.com)
Sony has taken the wraps off of its latest smartphone camera sensor which it says can shoot 1080p slow-motion video at 1,000 frames per second. "The new 3-layer CMOS sensor -- an industry first -- can capture slow motion video about eight times faster than its competition with minimal focal pane distortion, according to Sony," reports The Verge. From their report: The sensor can also take 19.3MP images in 1/120th of a second, which Sony says is four times faster than other chips, thanks to high-capacity DRAM, and a 4-tier construction on the circuit section used to convert analog video signals to digital signals. All of that fancy camera talk basically means this sensor blows every camera currently in a smartphone out of the water. Although the iPhone 7 and the Google Pixel can shoot 1080p slow-motion video at 120fps, they are still miles behind what Sony has reached with its latest sensor. At 1,000fps it even surpasses the Sony RX 100 V, which can only shoot at 960fps.
Full HD at 8 bit per channel is about 50Mbit.
Their specs say the DRAM has 1Gbit capacity.
So that's 20 frames at high speed that can fit in the internal buffer.
At 240 fps (their specs don't mention 1000 fps??), that gives you 0.08s of video before it needs to be transferred to flash storage.
Transfer to flash is probably a few orders of magnitude slower, so this will only work for very short bursts of 20 frames.
They could use the chip in a specialized camera with a high bandwidth RAM buffer, but for smartphones this just seems to be a gimmick.
FWIW, the 3 layers are not red/green/blue, but photosensor, DRAM, and logic. It's a standard Bayer pattern sensor; not a multilayer color sensor. And by "focal plane distortion" they don't mean focus error due to different depths for RGB, but rolling shutter ("jello effect"). (The post was a bit confusing - it's easy to read it as being about a Foveon-type sensor. But no.)
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
> smartphone focus will eventually push development away from the DSLR form factor entirely.
Complete nonsense. The same technology is used for both. DSLRs and Mirrorless system cameras get the technology first and phones only benefit later. Current developments in cameras are moving to 4K and higher and using this to do 'HDR', 'post focus'* and 'focus stacking'* by getting the camera to take several very high speed shots, varying focus or aperture or other, and then the user can choose the one(s) they want to keep or merge.
These cameras can also be set to take photos continuously into a cyclic buffer _until_ the button is pressed. The user can then choose the appropriate shot from the one second or so prior to get the best action shot.
Very high frames rates are not just for making slow movies. When the processing power of the phones improve then these features will also move to them.
* https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-fz2500-fz2000/4