If you thought Samsung's recently announced 200MP smartphone camera sensor wasn't pixel-rich enough, how about a 576MP camera?

This is what Haechang Lee, Samsung's senior vice president and head of automotive sensors, suggested in a talk at SEMI Europe (via Image Sensors World and Notebookcheck). Samsung already offers some of the highest resolution camera sensors available, which could rival or even surpass the human eye within the next few years.

In his presentation "The Image Sensor Journey - To the Human Eye and Beyond," Lee discussed the history of Samsung's camera technology and the company's future plans. Citing the resolution of the human eye, which is generally estimated to be about 576 MP, Lee suggested that Samsung is aiming for a resolution comparable to that by 2025.

Samsung has talked about this goal before, including in this 2020 blog post, but a full 576 MP resolution camera will probably never be used in a smartphone. As mentioned in this blog post, Samsung is considering developing special sensors for autonomous vehicles, drones, and developing IoT markets.

When it comes to smartphones, having a ridiculous number of pixels is definitely more versatile than having a normal number of pixels. One is free to use the full resolution of the camera or to use "pixel bins," which combine information from adjacent pixels to create virtual superpixels to create a lower-resolution image with better brightness. On the other hand, how often does a user need to take 576 MP images?

A larger sensor is not automatically better. Two of the best camera phones today, the Google Pixel 5 and the iPhone 12 series, use 12MP sensors. As for Samsung's phones, the highly acclaimed Galaxy S21 Ultra uses a 108MP main camera, but the reason it is far from the top spot has nothing to do with hardware, but with Samsung's post-processing and computational photography.

It is possible that Samsung's recently unveiled new ISOCELL HP1 200MP camera will be used in the Samsung Galaxy S22, especially the S22 Ultra model. However, recent rumors suggest that Samsung's 108MP camera will again be used on the S22 Ultra.

While it is exciting to see Samsung pushing the limits of its camera sensors, we will need to be patient to reap the benefits.