Sony has announced a 1000fps, triple-layered camera sensor for your smartphone

Sony has announced a brand new sensor design that enables just this; 1000fps capture at full HD resolution.

Tech2 News Staff|Feb 08, 2017, 15:30:30 IST

Your iPhone and a handful of Android phones can slow video down by 5x. But what if you could slow things down by 64x? Imagine the kind of footage you’d capture. If Sony has its way, that future isn’t so far off.

Sony has announced a brand new sensor design that enables just this; 1000fps capture at full HD resolution. It doesn’t have a name as such, and is only referred to by the descriptive ‘3-layer stacked CMOS image sensor with DRAM’ for smartphones.

The key here is the DRAM layer. It’s a layer of high-speed memory sandwiched between the photosensitive pixel layer and the rest of the circuitry. This DRAM acts as a buffer for storing image data that is yet to be processed.

Sony claims that the new sensor is capable of reading a 19.3MP image in just 1/120 of a second. A full HD video is a little over 2MP, hence the speed of the video capture.[caption id="attachment_361439" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image: Sony Global[/caption]The design of the sensor has also been revamped a bit, says Sony. Noise between the layers has been reduced, the processing power of the image processing circuit has also been improved.

In fact, Sony says that this new found processing speed now lets the sensor capture images faster, reducing the focal plane distortion seen in captures of fast-moving objects. It’s apparently possible to enable high-speed video capture automatically when fast movement is detected.

While the sensor can capture video at 1000fps, Sony hasn’t confirmed that that ability is indeed coming to a smartphone anytime soon.

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