Sony unveils Lytia 901 200MP phone sensor

Sony Semiconductor has announced the Lytia 901, its first 200MP smartphone image sensor — signaling Sony’s serious stance within ultra-high-resolution mobile photography.

Differently from Samsung’s 200MP options, the new chip ships in a larger format and with bigger pixel pitch.

The new chip is already being delivered to phone makers and could headline future flagship handsets from OPPO and vivo.

The Lytia 901 has a 1/1.12-inch type sensor with pixels that are 0.7µm on a side. That trumps Samsung’s existing 200MP workhorse, the Isocell HP2 (approximately 1/1.3-inch, 0.6µm), on two key fronts: total sensor area and individual pixel size.

There are no high-res specs for the sensor outside of its dimensions, but by loosey-goosey math, we can calculate that Sony’s chip’s imaging area is around 35 percent larger while it has roughly 36 percent more pixel surface for light to hit.

Those gains should translate to cleaner shadows, more forgiving mixed-light scenes, and less aggressive noise reduction — especially when shooting at night or indoors.

They would also lead to shallower depth of field at a given framing and aperture, meaning more natural subject separation without being reliant on heavy computational blur.

Sony is leaning heavily on pixel binning for balancing resolution and sensitivity.

The Lytia 901 features 16-in-1 binning to produce default 12.5MP images with a downsampled pixel pitch of 2.8µm.

Larger effective pixels generally translate into improved low-light performance, more seamless tonal transitions, and faster, more accurate autofocus in low light.

All-pixel autofocus spans the entire frame, which makes it easier for the camera to pull focus on a subject in motion without leaving hunting artifacts behind.

That full-spanning focusing approach has paid dividends in more recent Sony sensors, and here it’s just as important on account of the ultra-tight 200MP array.

For zoom, Sony touts up to 4x in-sensor magnification. Combined with AI learning-based remosaicing, the system is designed to avoid loss of fine detail during crops and also help prevent the appearance of moiré and zippering — a place where high-megapixel sensors can suffer if their demosaicing isn’t up to scratch.

Dynamic range is also a priority. Lytia 901 features Dual Conversion Gain HDR for single-frame highlight control and Hybrid Frame HDR combining multiple short exposures with DCG data.

Sony claims this method can achieve more than 100dB of dynamic range, which should mean clipped skies and murky shadows go the way of tardigrades while avoiding the ghosting artifacts that sometimes trouble “traditional” multi-frame HDR.