Samsung makes a custom camera sensor for Galaxy S26 Ultra rival

While most people know Samsung for its smartphones and TVs, it also makes almost all critical components for electronic devices, including display panels, RAM and storage chips, batteries, power ICs, and camera sensors. The company has now designed a custom camera sensor for a smartphone that will compete with the Galaxy S26 Ultra early next year.

It was recently revealed that Samsung Electronics' System LSI division, which develops mobile camera sensors, has developed a custom ISOCELL camera sensor for the Vivo X300 Pro and the Vivo X300 Ultra. Both these high-end phones from China will be announced before the end of this year and will compete with Samsung's own Galaxy S26 Ultra.

Han Boxiao, the product manager at Vivo, revealed that the name of Samsung's new camera sensor is ISOCELL HPB. The alphabet B in the model name stands for Blue. Similar to the ISOCELL HP9 camera sensor used in the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the ISOCELL HPB is a 1/1.4-inch 200MP sensor with 0.56µm pixels, and it can capture 200MP wide-angle (23mm) images and 50MP telephoto (50mm) images.

The Vivo X300 Pro will use the ISOCELL HPB for its primary camera, while the Vivo X300 Ultra will use it for its telephoto camera. This sensor will be paired with the same blue glass with Zeiss T* coating to reduce stray light and ghosting. It is reportedly capable of using a high-pixel multi-frame fusion technology for image processing.

Vivo will use its Blueprint algorithms with integrated hardware and software optimisations for better images and videos at long zoom ranges.

It is a shame that Samsung itself isn't using the same camera sensor for the telephoto camera of the Galaxy S26 Ultra, as it is expected to use a 1/2.55-inch 50MP telephoto camera with a 5x optical zoom lens, a 200MP primary rear camera with OIS, a 50MP ultrawide camera with autofocus, and a 12MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom.

The company should start using bigger camera sensors than what it is currently using. It should also try to add sensor-shift optical image stabilization to the primary camera on its high-end phones.