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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and those crappy sensors will still be 200 megapixels (which will be used as an advertising point), as most people don’t realize that a fantastic 24 MP camera is better than a crummy 200 MP one.

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Those 200 MP sensors are 200 MP in name only. They're so small the individual pixels are smaller than the wavelength of light they're trying to capture. That's why when you use them, the max image size is usually around 50MP because binning is required physically

That is insane (not your comment, the fact that the sensors are that small)!

Here [1] is the first result when I searched, it's the powerfully-named Omnivision "OVB0B" sensor.

It has a resolution of 16384x12288 pixels (=201,326,592 pixels in total) meaning individual pixels are 0.61 µm. Visible light is generally around 0.4 µm to 0.7 µm so the sensor is definitely in that size region with its pixels. Wow. Thanks for pointing this out.

[1]: https://www.ovt.com/products/ovb0b/

Worse; the crappy sensors will be only 8 megapixels or less, but the camera software will inflate that with AI to 200 megapixels.

This has been happening for ages in the trail camera market.

I'm happy that the new metric is sensor size. A bit of an upgrade in metric that mildly correlates to picture quality.

That's good as long as they quote the sensor size in millimetres for the width and height (e.g. 36 mm × 24 mm "full frame").

What is atrocious is the inch format - e.g. 1 inch sensor, 1/2.2" (decimal and fraction!). It somehow refers to the diagonal length of the vacuum tube and not even the active image area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_format#Table_of_s... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Size

True, the lens is usually more important than the sensor, remember that the hubble space telescope is only one megapixel.

and the speaker is 300 watts*

*300 watts for 1e-20ns

Yeah, definitely; megapixels are a more or less objective metric, but they're only one factor to image quality, and nowadays not even really the most important one.

Pixel count is objective, but never meant much. Sensor area is much more important, but doesn't make for a sexy number, and it often doesn't make it into the spec sheet.

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