Sony’s new 64MP sensor could be a game-changer for telephoto cameras

Sony has announced a new camera sensor designed for phones

It has an unusual pixel structure that improves its resolution

The company highlights it as being a particularly good fit for telephoto cameras

Telephoto cameras are often a weak link in smartphone camera arrays. Many phones don’t offer them at all, and those that do often use smaller sensors or fewer megapixels than their wide and ultra-wide counterparts. But a new Sony sensor could deliver a big telephoto upgrade if the best camera phones incorporate it.

The Sony LYTIA 610 is the industry’s first mass-produced sensor to have an ‘RB2×2 On Chip Lens (OCL) pixel structure.’ We won’t get too weighed down in technical details, but the upshot is that, according to Sony, this design achieves both “improved resolution and excellent autofocusing” at the same time.

There’s a greater than 20% improvement in spatial resolution (meaning its ability to resolve fine details) compared to conventional Sony sensors with the same pixel size, and the company specifically highlights telephoto cameras as benefiting from all this.

Plus, this sensor also offers an improved readout speed, allowing for 4K 120fps video recording and 4K 60fps HDR recording. So it could prove beneficial for videos as well as photos.

Reducing the performance gap

Sony also notes that this sensor “reduces the performance gap with the large sensors used on main cameras and suppresses variations in image quality across multi-lens camera systems, enabling a more uniform shooting experience.” So, in other words, if this is used for telephoto cameras, then you’re less likely to get noticeably inferior shots than when taking wide or ultra-wide photos.

This is all achieved without increasing the sensor or pixel size from Sony’s more conventionally designed LYTIA 601 sensor, which some phones currently use for their telephoto cameras. Potentially, then, this new sensor could deliver improved results without much of a price hike or a larger space requirement.

Of course, it remains to be seen which, if any, phones will actually use this sensor, but aside from Sony’s own Xperia handsets, you’ll also find Sony cameras in at least certain phones by Google, Xiaomi, and even Apple, among other brands. So there are any number of future handsets that could potentially get a telephoto boost from this sensor.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.