Lenovo’s president posted a picture on the social network Weibo in which he is talking about the imminent launch of a new mobile with a very special feature: the 200 Mpixel sensor. The figure is gorgeous, but the truth is that if the evolution of mobile phones has shown anything right now, it’s that more megapixels don’t equal more quality. The question, of course, is how many megapixels is too much. maybe 200?

Wow, Motorola. There is not much data on this theoretical model, but if we pay attention to that 200 Mpixel figure, it seems clear that Motorola will use the Samsung ISOCELL HP1 sensor that it announced last fall.

Pixel grouping for power. Like previous ultra-high resolution sensors, this sensor uses pixel grouping technology that combines/groups pixels, ultimately enabling the 200 MP sensor to capture 12.5 MP images with enhanced light sensitivity. It remains to be seen whether the post-processing software of this terminal can produce a well-defined image.

Comparisons are hateful. For example, something strange happens with these sensors when “pure” cameras don’t come close to these levels. The Hasselblad H6D-400C costs 40,000 Euros and can automatically combine several of them to produce 400 Mpixel images, but its sensor is 100 Mpixels.

The Phase One XT IQ4 has the highest resolution native sensor in the segment and reaches “only” 150 Mpixels: it costs 53,000 Euros. This leaves some doubts about the performance of the 200 Mpixel sensor used by Motorola, as they already existed when 64 or 108 Mpixel sensors began to appear.

200 Mpixels (maybe) doesn’t matter. For years Google stuck with only 8 Mpix sensors, and neither he nor Apple have gotten into the megapixel war lately. We’ve said this many times already, and we repeat it with the iPhone 13 Pro: Don’t be fooled by the 12-megapixel sensors, because they have a lot of juice in them.

Megapixels can certainly help, but components like the ISP and of course post-processing systems and computational photography are even more important today to achieve good results. These systems are actually so ambitious that they have become somewhat authoritarian: sometimes they don’t let us get the picture we want.

But having more megapixels sounds good. The truth is, although tests and comparisons have shown time and time again that having more megapixels is no guarantee of anything – tell those who later upload them to Instagram – many mobile phone manufacturers pay special attention to this part and do not drop the ads. As if phones with high-resolution sensors were a sufficient guarantee to win the mobile photography race. No, but it doesn’t matter: Samsung is already preparing a 576 Mpixel sensor. We were few…