Samsung's Next 108MP Camera To Skip Galaxy Note 20 For Xiaomi

Although Samsung is perhaps best known for its smartphones and TVs, its myriad businesses cover the very components used in those consumer products. Samsung not only makes the display panels for smartphones, it also makes processors, RAM, storage, and camera sensors for those. Of course, it also sells those components to other phone makers, and, for the second time, it seems that Xiaomi will be getting a new and more advanced ISOCELL imaging sensor ever before Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Note 20 flagship.

It's probably more of a scheduling issue than any kind of favoritism. Xiaomi was also the first to get hold of Samsung's first-ever 108 megapixel sensor, the ISOCELL Bright HMX, because the Galaxy Note 10 was already out and the Galaxy S20 was still months away. The latter got, instead, a more refined ISOCELL Bright HM1 and that could be the same cadence we'll see this year.

A new leak mentions a new sensor by the name of the ISOCELL Bright HM2 which, as the name suggests, should still have that same high 108-megapixel count as the previous sensors. What might be different, SamMobile theorizes, is that this sensor will use the new Nonacell technology used in the Bright HM1 on the Galaxy S20 Ultra.

Without knowing more details about this new sensor, it could simply be that the ISOCELL Bright HM2 will be a very incremental update. It could, however, also be a variant of the sensor that's intended to be used by other phone makers, reserving the ISOCELL Bright HM1 and its secrets to Samsung's own.

This 108MP Samsung ISOCELL Bright HM2 sensor is rumored to be headed to the Xiaomi Mi CC10 Pro and won't be its only camera superpower. It is also rumored to boast of a 12x optical zoom, a first for any smartphone, and 120x digital zoom, which we all know by now to be more a marketing gimmick than a usable feature.