Samsung has announced its new 1/1.12-inch 50MP ISOCELL GN2 sensor, the successor to last year’s GN1.
The ISOCELL GN2 will be Samsung’s first Dual Pixel Pro-offering image sensor. Dual Pixel Pro offers what Samsung calls Phase Detection Autofocus, which calculates focus distance by comparing the “phase differences in images generated by left-looking and right-looking pixels”.
Samsung says that Dual Pixel Pro can achieve autofocus in milliseconds, thanks to having every sensor being used for phase detection and having two photodiodes. The technology also makes use of green pixels which “divide photodiodes with a diagonal structure”, allowing for greater autofocus accuracy including when dealing with low-lighting and fast-moving subjects.
The ISOCELL GN2 captures 1.4μm-sized pixels and offers four-pixel-binning to create 2.8μm pixels for low-light situations. It also has a 100Mp mode, which “meticulously re-arranges the color pixels using an intelligent re-mosaic algorithm, creating three individual layers of 50MP frames in green, red and blue”. The frames are later up-scaled and merged into a 100MP photo.
Other features of the new sensor include Smart ISO, Smart ISO Pro, and staggered-HDR. Staggered-HDR makes use of “rolling shutters over the same pixel arrays to capture multiple frames in short, middle, and long exposures” and is said to reduce sensor energy consumption by up to 24 percent. For video capture, the sensor supports 4K 120 FPS and 1080p 480FPS.
Samsung hasn’t said when we’ll be seeing devices with the ISOCELL GN2, but it says that the sensor is currently in mass production.
