Samsung printed a gigantic cat photo shot with its 200MP mobile sensor

We’ve known about Samsung’s 200MP sensor for a while now, but one has not appeared on a smartphone so far. While rumor has it that a Motorola phone will soon come baked with the world’s highest-resolution camera, Samsung has now given us a first look at the imaging results of the sensor.

Samsung went all out with its 200MP sensor, which it says is still under development. It shot an image using the camera module and printed an enormous 28-meter-wide and 22-meter-high photograph. That’s about one and a half times the size of a basketball court!

“I have always wondered just how big you could go when it comes to printing out a 200MP image,” Minhyuk Lee, an engineer from the Sensor Solutions Team at Samsung’s System LSI Business, said, explaining the process.

So how did they do it? For starters, Samsung did not bake the 200MP sensor into a smartphone. The team chose a cat as a subject and attached the camera module to a test board.

“The photographer first checked the screen and adjusted the composition. Then, the engineers modified the settings to optimize exposure and focus. After observing the cat’s movements, the film crew then used different methods to take a series of pictures,” Samsung said, describing the process.

The team then printed the 616 square meter image on twelve separate 2.3-meter-long pieces of fabric and then stitched it together. You can see the resulting image in the video embedded above.

“The ultimate benefit of the 200MP image sensor is to allow users to capture an image that can be zoomed in and cropped without compromising on image quality,” said Kaeul Lee and Minhyuk Lee of Samsung’s Sensor Solutions team. “The 200MP image sensor will soon become the optimal solution for 8K video recording,” they concluded in the press post.

When it lands on phones, Samsung’s HP1 200MP sensor will use its new ChameleonCell pixel-binning tech, which allows the sensor to group four or 16 pixels into a single larger pixel. These configurations effectively turn the sensor into a 50MP sensor with 1.28-micron pixels or a 12.5MP sensor with 2.56-micron pixels.