Galaxy Note 4 Teardown Confirms Sony IMX240 16-Megapixel Camera Sensor

Samsung has a tradition of using the same camera sensors across its entire smartphone line-up of Galaxy S and Note series in any given year.

Contrary to this tradition, the company for the first time has moved away from its new ISOCELL technology found in Galaxy S5 and has incorporated Sony's 16-megapixel IMX2410 camera sensor in the Note 4, owing to the lack of Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) support with its native camera sensor.

Though Samsung had earlier disclosed the presence of 16-megapixel rear camera on its new flagship phablet, it had not revealed the make or model of the camera for some reason.

The latest Note 4 teardown performed by IT168 clearly confirms that Samsung has implemented Sony's IMX240 camera with ½in sensor that is nearly 15% larger than the average ⅓in sensor used in the high-end smartphones.

In other words, the camera sensor delivers a pixel size of very small 1.1 microns, which should impact on both image resolution and clarity.

The abrupt shift from Samsung's native camera sensor to Sony's IMX240 seems to address a few of the earlier limitations with phase-detection pixels, image clarity and image resolution, while using fast auto-focus on smaller components, such as identifying the chipset on a logicboard.

Check out a few of those teardown images captured on a Note 4's 16MP snapper (below):