One of the highlight features of the new Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ is the phones’ Super Slow-Mo feature. Slow motion videos have always been available, either in other phones or through an app, but Samsung wants the feature native to the Galaxy S9’s camera app. So the team behind the camera had to figure out how to make that happen. The “seed” idea behind the feature, was to give users capability to slow down a moment captured on video for better appreciation. But was there a camera good enough to do that?
If you have a slow motion feature on your phone, you probably can slow down videos to as much as 200 or 300 frames per second (fps). That should be enough for normal slow motion needs. But Samsung designed its Super Slow-Mo feature to capture 960 fps, and that’s over 4 times faster than normal camera sensors are able to do it. Was there a CMOS sensor fast enough to handle such a feature?
As per Samsung, the secret behind this was not only a better and faster sensor, but a new way of designing the phone’s video capture. What you get with the Samsung Galaxy S9 is a three-layer stack image sensor that has (1) an image sensor 4 times faster than normal, (2) a faster readout circuit to give more bandwidth between the sensor going to the processor, and (3) a dedicated DRAM memory chip just for the camera’s dedicated use.
This is the secret to the Galaxy S9’s buttery smooth Super Slow-Mo feature. Samsung really capitalized with a great camera on this new flagship. Now if only the rumors of underwhelming battery performance would go away.
SOURCE: Samsung
