Sony has a new 12 MP RGBW Sensor for the next iPhone.

While this news is not directly related to the Alpha World it’s still interesting to hear about Sony’s future sensor tech. Feng.com reports that the next generation of Apple iPhones will use a brand new 12 Megapixel RGBW Sony sensor. The “W” stands for “White” pixels and it allows to increase the sensitivity which is a weak point of current smartphone photocameras. Usually those RGBW sensors have as a consequence that the pixels size decreased and therefore the image quality gets poorer. But Sony claims they solved this with a new kind of technology (not explained yet):

While the individual pixels of the Sony models are extremely minute at 1.12μm, the incorporation of the “RBGW Coding” function has realized a SN ratio (signal-to-noise ratio) equivalent to that of a unit pixel size of 1.4μm under conventional methods, which in turn has enables the image sensors to achieve a higher resolution at a more compact size.

Don’t know if that RGBW sensor tech will be applied on future APS-C or FF sensors too.