Pixel Binning in Camera Sensors

The concept of pixel binning is a rage these days. Almost every smartphone maker is using this technology to lure their customers. The pace at which smartphone cameras are getting better has dropped in the last few years. However, the quality of aperture and images has been changing continuously. The biggest limitation in making the next big change comes to mobile phone photography with the imaging sensor. When Huawei P20 Pro uses a denser, larger sensor camera, the other flagship smartphones still stuck with the 12MP resolution.

While not many smartphone makers would want to make the effort of using large-format camera sensors, Pixel Binning is the latest technology to check the limit of how far we can push existing hardware choices.

What is Pixel Binning?

Pixel Binning is a clocking scheme used to merge the charge collected by several adjective CCD pixels and is designed to reduce the noise and enhance the signal to noise ratio and frame rate of digital cameras.

Benefits and uses of Pixel Binning:

Pixel Binning reduces the biggest problem that almost every smartphone camera has: low light photography. The sensor sensitivity has to be boosted remarkably when shooting in low light. This reduces the signals to noise ratio notably per pixel, resulting in not just noise reduction but also softens the dynamic range, poor color reproduction and erratically even poor exposure. By merging raw data from four pixels to one, the effectual output is a higher amount of light captures, while alleviating the noise generated.