US company OmniVision announced OV16820 and OV16825, two new “CameraChip” sensors aimed at digital video/photo cameras and smartphones with a 16 megapixel native resolution. The sensors can capture ultra high-definition video clips (4K or 4K2K), a yet-to-become-mainstream feature especially in the smartphone market.
The two chips will bring 4K shooting to USA smartphones through the company’s partners at the beginning of 2013, and OmniVision should be the second player on the market to achieve this feat after Nokia announced that PureView (the 41 megapixel camera-equipped phone) will be released in the States in the upcoming months.
OV16820 (available in a ceramic land grid array) and OV16825 (available in die form) are able to capture RAW RGB images with 10 or 12-bit color depth, shoot videos in full resolution (4608x3456 pixels) at 30 frames per second, in 4K2K (3840x2160 pixels) at 60 fps and in Full HD (1920x1080 pixels) at 60 fps “with extra pixels for electronic image stabilization”, OmniVision’s press release states.
16 megapixel images with burst photography performance can be captured in rapid succession, the company says, and all the processing functions of the chip (including defective pixel and noise canceling, RAW scaling, image size, frame rate, exposure, gain, cropping and orientation) are programmable via the integrated serial camera control bus (SCCB) interface.
OmniVision is no stranger to achieving high performances for digital imaging technology: the company estimates that over 2.5 billions of its CMOS sensors have been shipped with revenues (for fiscal year 2011) of 956 million dollars. The Santa Clara-based company partners include Apple Inc., to which OmniVision supplies CMOS sensors for the iPhone 4s’ rear camera.
Source: OmniVision press release.
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