Paying attention to smartphone CMOS sensors has been one of the things we've been doing for a while now in our smartphone reviews, and today OmniVision announced details about their upcoming 16 MP CMOS sensors. The announcement details two upcoming 16 MP CMOSes, the OV16820 and OV16825, which differ only in their packaging (Ceramic LGA for for OV16820 and raw die form for OV16825). Both are are 16 MP with an active area of 4608 x 3456, with 1.34µm square pixels built on OmniVision's OmniBSI-2 pixel structure.

This is slightly smaller than the 1.4µm we've seen in other OV and Samsung sensors, but still much larger than upcoming 1.1 or 1.2 µm based designs. The result is that OV's 16 MP sensor should deliver similar sensitivity as current 1.4µm based sensors - there should be a minimal increase in noise over other BSI-2 based OmniVision sensors. The tradeoff is that the OV1682x is a bit bigger than the smartphone sensors out right now, at 1/2.3", which will necessitate new optical designs or a system with longer throw (thickness).

Probably one of the other headlining features is inclusion of 60 FPS video capture at 4K2K (3840 x 2160) and QFHD (3840 x 2160 - Quad Full HD) or full frame output at 30 FPS. The usual caveats still apply though - you still need an ISP and video encoder capable of handling the 8 lanes of MIPI output and all that data. We've already seen some smartphones moving to very high resolution CMOS sensors, like the HTC TItan II's 16 MP camera or the Nokia PureVision 808 at 41 MP. The OV1682x family is targeted both at high end smartphones and digital video / still cameras, and will enter production in the fourth quarter of 2012. Samsung also has a similarly specced 16 MP 1/2.3" 1.34 µm sensor in the S5K2P1 which is currently in production.

Source: OmniVision (Spec Page), OmniVision (Press Release)