Image Sensors on Nalar

Camera Rolling Shutter and Sensor Readout

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0700

A fast pan can make a straight lamp post appear tilted. A spinning propeller can look curved or split into strange shapes. These effects can occur even when every individual pixel is working correctly. The cause is often rolling shutter, a timing effect created as an image sensor reads a frame over a finite interval.

Many CMOS camera sensors do not capture and read every row at precisely the same instant. Instead, exposure timing progresses across the sensor, commonly row by row. If the scene changes during that interval, different parts of the frame represent slightly different moments.

Camera Pixel Binning Trades Resolution for Signal

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0700

A phone camera may advertise a 48, 50, 108, or 200 megapixel sensor but normally save photos at a much lower resolution. That difference is often intentional. Many high-resolution sensors group information from neighboring photosites before producing the image that reaches the photo library.

This process is commonly called pixel binning. It gives the camera pipeline a different balance between spatial resolution, signal quality, processing cost, and file size. The sensor still has its physical array of photosites, but the default output does not need to preserve one final image pixel for every photosite.