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Friday, March 16, 2012

Chipworks Finds Omnivision Sensors Inside the New iPad

Chipworks was quick revealing Omnivision OV5650 5MP BSI sensor inside the main camera of the new iPad. This is the same 1.75um pixel sensor used in iPhone 4:


The secondary VGA camera uses Omnivision's OV297AA 3um pixel sensor. The same sensor is used in iPod Nano and iPad 2:


Thanks to EK for sending me the news! Looks like Needham was wrong predicting Samsung sensors in iPad in January.
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14 comments:

  1. AnonymousMarch 16, 2012 at 10:38 PM

    i would have liked to see a bsi-2 part like the 5690 in the new ipad for ovt's sake. as an analyst, i question why ovt's newest and finest wasn't used. was it unavailable due to poor yields? did apple feel the older technology was better than the new tech? was it because any price differential with the new technolgy was not justified by a quality differential? did ovt sell the old technology at firesale to clear the shelves of the excess inventory? and i'm wondering if ovt fixed the problem with the "yellowing" of stills in low light.

    have a nice weekend everyone.

    EK

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMarch 16, 2012 at 11:12 PM

    Bravo!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kevin PurcellMarch 16, 2012 at 11:48 PM

    Three possibilities on Apple not using the newer OVT part: (as suggested) not available in high yield in time for iPad volume shipments; retaining old part means drivers are identical with iPad 2 saving development effort; or a marketing choice.

    The iPad 3G big selling point is the new display. Perhaps marketing is holding back a better camera for a 4G release. Apple has dribbled feature changes (e.g. on the MacBook Pro from 2005 to 2012) when the underlying hardware (e.g. gesture recognizing trackpad) was capable of more than Apple wanted (and features Apple never enabled on older hardware).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousMarch 19, 2012 at 5:55 AM

      better display needs better camera! you mean iPad4 release? pretty hard to imagine ipad4 to ipad3 will be a bigger upgrade than 2 to 3

      Delete
  4. AnonymousMarch 17, 2012 at 1:56 AM

    The "yellowing" of stills in low light is majorly ISP tuning issues.

    OVT only supplied the sensor in raw format, all the ISP is done by aapl.

    should not be an sensor issue.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Ipad 2 did not use the same sensor, i beleve it was iphone 4 uses the same 5Mp sensor.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Vladimir KoifmanMarch 17, 2012 at 9:36 AM

      @ "i beleve it was iphone 4 uses the same 5Mp sensor"

      The post states the same. The secondary VGA sensor was used in iPad 2 and iPod Nano.

      Delete
  5. AnonymousMarch 17, 2012 at 2:06 AM

    bravo

    ReplyDelete
  6. Dennis ZhouMarch 17, 2012 at 3:54 AM

    OV's stock price soared 2% today. It went up as high as 19.36 at noon.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousMarch 17, 2012 at 6:37 PM

    Gismodo says that New iPad takes better HD video than iPhone 4S. They attribute that feat to the processing speed of the New iPad.
    http://gizmodo.com/5893987/ipad-test-notes-camera-performance

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousMarch 18, 2012 at 7:57 PM

    there were some apparent errors in the chipworks announcement. first they implied the 5650 was ovt's second generation bsi. it's not. it's bsi-1. then chipworks said that the 5650 shot 1080p at 60 fps and that this was the same as the apple tech spec. not true. the 5650 ovt pdf and the apple tech spec both say 1080p at 30 fps. and i should point out that tristan from blair had said that the new ipad would use a 1mp as the camera in front and it ended up being a 300k vga part. so there is a lot of misinformation on this floating around.

    EK

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ChipworksGaryMarch 19, 2012 at 4:14 PM

      Omnivision originally marketed the OV5650 as second generation BSI (OV5642 was 1st generation). To confuse matters they subsequently marketed Omni BSI-2 (Which is now in the market with the OV8830).
      Omnivision do claim OVT5650 as HD video @60 fps
      http://www.ovt.com/products/sensor.php?id=67
      (But not 1080p 60fps that was an error)

      Delete
  9. AnonymousMarch 20, 2012 at 9:08 AM

    OV5642 should be OmniPixel3 HS. OV5650 is the BSI-1 (200mm) Then, OV has the BSI-2 (300mm) for OV8830
    Surely both BS-1 & BSI-2 will generate yellowish caused by crosstalk. OVT will have BSI+(OV5680) and wish it can reduce the yellowish.
    The question should be why Apple can tolerate it... any special deals perhaps extremely low price (less than 20% margin)

    OV5650 is the rear camera sensor of iphone4. No kidding, just compare iphone 4 & 4S, you immediately see the huge difference.

    All rumors have their believing sources. The new ipad doesn't pick up new sensors? report is incorrect or something happened in the supply chain

    ReplyDelete

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