#Domestic CMOS# Since Huawei was restricted, people for the mobile phone industry supply chain localization, attention to the attention of suddenly mentioned very high, and in recent years, our domestic supply chain manufacturers are also quite powerful, not only chips have been breakthroughs, in the screen, flash memory, etc., completely achieved not to lose to overseas manufacturers, this is indeed a gratifying thing, their progress, consumers are also in the eyes.
The recently listed Huawei Mate60 Pro also proves the progress of domestic supply chain manufacturers, because this is a mobile phone with the highest localization rate so far, the chip is from Huawei's self-research, the screen is from BOE, and the flash memory part is from Yangtze River Storage. It's just that one component is used by overseas suppliers, that is, CMOS sensor chips, equipped with Sony IMX766, so in the CMOS field, what is the situation of our domestic manufacturers today.
Domestic CMOS sensors were still very strong in those years
In fact, if we want to say that there are pure domestic CMOS manufacturers, there are even manufacturers such as Changguang Chenxin that can produce 8K full-frame stacked sensors, but only OmniVision (OmniVision), which we often call OV (not a blue-green factory).
At the earliest, OV was just a Taiwanese company registered in the United States, but after 2019, it was successfully harvested by Weier shares, making OV a domestic CMOS sensor manufacturer, up to now, OV has become the world's third largest sensor manufacturer, second only to Sony and Samsung, but the position of this "old three" is a little far from the first and second.
And to say that OV's fame must be OV48C, it debuted on the Xiaomi 10 Supreme Edition, I believe that users who have used this mobile phone have been impressed by its main camera sensor, and the 1/1.32-inch bottom also makes the Xiaomi 10 Supreme Edition one of the mobile phones with the largest sensor area at that time. Unfortunately, this is OV's first time as the main camera on a high-end flagship machine, and it is also the last, and subsequent Xiaomi's Ultra models also use Samsung and Sony sensors.
So since the flagship can not be the main camera, then focus on the mid-range machine, so there are many mid-range machines that use OV50A and OV60A two sensors, and OV64B has become the first choice for periscope telephoto lenses of many mobile phone manufacturers with its advantages in size and pixels, and it can be regarded as part of the recognition.
May consider the problem of fame, almost all mobile phone manufacturers at the conference, will not positively introduce the sensor using OV, let alone take it as a selling point, which also causes OV to be a little-known sensor manufacturer.
So is this situation caused by the poor sensor of OV? In fact, OV was a proper "domestic light" in those years. Take the OV48C on the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra Edition, for example, with a 1/1.32-inch outsole, 48 million pixels, support for dual native (double-gain) ISO, and also supports interleaved HDR imaging. From all aspects, this OV48C was not backward at the time, and even far ahead in some areas, after all, you know, the famous IMX766 will not have a staggered HDR structure until 2021.
Therefore, after the debut of OV48C, many people are full of expectations for OV, a domestic sensor manufacturer, and think that it must be a rising future star, but no one expected that the subsequent development of OV does not seem to be so smooth.
The subsequent development seems to be a little different from what we thought
Take its latest flagship product OV50H, which is a 50 million pixels, 1/1.28-inch outsole, unit pixel size of 1.2μm sensor, and also supports horizontal + vertical four-pixel phase focus, which is the first time in OV history. But compared with other products on the market, OV50H is a bit unranked, and can only be compared with Samsung GN1.
And other sensors, OV50H can not be compared with them, after all, OV50H does not have photosensitive structure and optoelectronic transfer of design level architectural innovation, nor does it have the blessing of 1-inch super bottom, which makes it have no advantage in the face of sensors such as IMX888 or IMX989, and only some mid-range mobile phones will choose OV50H this sensor, after all, it is a large bottom sensor.
It's just that today's high-end flagship mobile phones, in fact, are very abundant from the perspective of cost, especially many flagship phones are based on images as a selling point, so there is no need to save costs, and choose OV sensors with poor comprehensive strength, which leads to high-end flagship machines, OV sensors are gradually marginalized until almost no one cares about them today. Unfortunately, the OV, which was "far ahead" of Sony and Samsung in sensor technology, is almost "out of everyone".
Fortunately, OV does not seem to plan to give up, in recent years has also launched OVB0B such a technical strength of the sensor, although it will take a certain amount of time to win back the favor of mobile phone manufacturers, but it can also be seen that OV has not given up technology research and development, I believe that if OV does not give up the pursuit of top CMOS sensors, we still have the opportunity to see domestic sensors return to flagship mobile phones in the future.