OmniVision's 5-Megapixel Sensor Shoots RAW on Cellphones [Sensors]

This is OmniVision's newest 1/4-inch, 5 megapixel RAW sensor. It's tiny, has low light sensitivity, captures 720p video at 60 fps or 1080p at 30 fps, and shoots in RAW. The best part? It could be in cellphones soon.

Now if only phones had lenses which would truly take advantage of sensors like this.

[Gizmod via PR Newswire via Engadget]

New cameraphone sensor to take terrible, terrible 1080p video

I’m sure this is a very grand advance in miniaturization, but I’m afraid the results may be questionable. Omnivision has announced a new sensor for mobile phone cameras that will take 14MP photos and do 1080p video at 60FPS. As far as I’m concerned, this is bad news. Cameraphone lenses are slow and of very low quality, and the tiny sensor size means both bad low light performance and bad clarity due to insanely small pixel pitch.


And the video will have to be low bitrate to accommodate the lack of storage on most phones. 1080p video at 1Mbps? It’ll be like watching an HDTV smeared with vaseline.

[CrunchGear]