Last week, Samsung filed a trademark application with KIPRIS (Korean Intellectual Property Rights Information Service) for the name XISO-CELL. First noticed by GalaxyClub, the app is currently under review. The accompanying documents reveal nothing except that the brand refers to a product that can be found in a wide variety of electronic products such as smartphones, computers, televisions, digital door locks, VR (virtual reality) headsets, video projectors and more.

While the app doesn’t say which Samsung product will be XISO-CELL branded, it’s pretty clear we’re looking at camera sensors. The Korean firm has been using the ISOCELL brand for the past few years. With the launch of the Galaxy S5 in 2014, it launched the first ISOCELL smartphone camera sensor. Since then, Samsung has been using the same name for its cameras. It introduced several variants under the ISOCELL Plus and ISOCELL 2.0 brand names, but the core remained unchanged.

Nearly nine years later, Samsung seems to be switching to a new name. More importantly, it should also mean new camera technology. ISOCELL got its name from “isolated cells”. The addition of the “X” prefix to the existing brand should be related to the company’s recent advances in camera sensor technology. Perhaps this points to a new sensor displacement technology that Samsung is said to launch in the Galaxy S23 series next year. We’ll have to wait and see.

For those unfamiliar, sensor offset technology moves the sensor to compensate for hand movement while shooting. Often considered a more effective form of OIS (Optical Image Stabilization), this camera technology is already present in the latest iPhones. Meanwhile, Samsung Galaxy smartphones currently use traditional OIS technology, which moves the lens instead of the sensor. The Korean firm may switch to optical image stabilization with sensor shift with the Galaxy S23 series.

If XISO-CELL is indeed Samsung’s trademark for sensor-shift camera sensors, the existing ISOCELL brand should not disappear. Sensors with or without traditional OIS must retain the existing naming system. It will more likely become clear that the Galaxy S23 series will be launched early next year. We’ll let you know when we get more information about the new Samsung XISO-CELL brand.