ISOCELL

ISOCELL is Samsung's brand of CMOS image sensors, launched in 2013. The name points to the trick: a physical barrier (deep trench isolation) is etched between pixels so that light hitting one pixel doesn't bleed into the next. Less crosstalk means cleaner colour and more pixels in the same area — which is how Samsung has been able to push phone sensors to 108 and even 200 megapixels.

The sensors sit in Samsung's own Galaxy phones and in competitors' handsets alike, and are the industry's main challenger to Sony's Exmor. Techniques like pixel binning, where several pixels are merged into one in low light, belong to the same family — the megapixel numbers in the marketing rarely tell the whole story.