(Image credit: Future)

Samsung is said to have developed camera sensor technology that replicates global shutter operation, moving away from the rolling shutter that's typical for digital sensors.

This technology will allow for faster capture, eliminate warping and distortion with fast moving subjects, and should improve the quality of capture.

The details have been reported by Sisa Journal (via Android Authority) with the site saying that as well as Samsung developing the tech, Apple is interested, suggested it could be coming to a brace a manufacturers in the future.

Smartphone cameras traditionally have what's called a rolling shutter, where the data is captured line by line on the sensor, rather than a global shutter which is what you'd get on an old school camera, for example. This latter system opens a mechanical shutter and exposes film.

The advantage of a global shutter is that the whole sensor captures data at the same moment, where a rolling shutter sees a minuscule time difference across the capture process. That doesn't matter for normal shooting, but becomes more noticeable when trying to capture something moving really fast.

For example: take a photo of a golf swing and the club will often look bent because of the effect of rolling shutter (accepting that the club flexes too).

The new technology hasn't completely moved over to global shutter capabilities, instead claiming that it offers "global shutter-level" performance. It still uses a rolling shutter approach, but with a new pixel structure to move the performance forward.

According to the details, the sensor is currently 12-megapixels with a 1.5µm pixel pitch with the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) integrated into the pixels themselves. This is likely to be to increase the speed of the conversion, as it's happening right there.

The findings are due to be published at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference 2026 held in February, so this is still very much coming out of the research stage. That makes it unlikely that it will land in a Samsung Galaxy or Apple iPhone immediately.

However, the interest is said to be there, as a way of moving smartphone photography forward. There's a lot to be figured out still – after all, manufacturers currently use high resolution as a marketing feature – but I'm sure we all remember in 2013 when HTC tried to convince customers that the HTC One's UltraPixel sensor (at 4 megapixels) was better than higher resolution sensors in rival devices.

Ultimately, that message didn't wash because HTC was an outlier, facing stronger messaging from elsewhere. Trying to sell someone a 12-megapixel camera instead of a 200-megapixel camera just to eliminate distortion on high speed subjects, isn't going to work.

So while this tech will undoubtedly contribute to better sensors, it needs to be balanced with selling a consumer advantage without compromise.