We have known about Samsung’s 200MP sensor for some time now though it hasn’t appeared on a smartphone so far. Now we have an idea about what it can achieve.

There’s a new video to showcase the capabilities of the ISOCELL HP1, highlighting the amount of detail the 200MP camera sensor from Samsung can preserve. With no phone out there featuring the sensor, in the video Samsung hooks the sensor to a prototype smartphone and uses a giant lens to capture a detailed image of a cute cat.

The image was then turned into an enormous 28-metre-wide by 22-metre-high photograph, which is about one and a half times the size of a basketball court. “I have always wondered just how big you could go when it comes to printing out a 200MP image,” said Minhyuk Lee, an engineer from the sensor solutions team at Samsung’s System LSI Business. “As exciting as it was, the challenge was a demanding one, as this was our first time showcasing the quality of an image sensor that has yet to be adopted in smartphones.”

The team chose a cat as test subject because it wanted to show the level of detail that can be captured on a moving object. The team calculated several variables while preparing to shoot in an unstable environment. They even built a custom adaptor to allow them to attach various DSLR camera lenses to a test board. “In the end, we thought it was most important to capture the scene in the same conditions that smartphone users would be in,” said Kaeul Lee of the sensor solutions team. “Because of this, we went with a smartphone camera module with no other aids. The results were very satisfying.”

The 616 square-metre image could not be printed all at once; it had to be printed on 12 separate 2.3-metre-long pieces of fabric and then stitched together. The printout was then transported over on a truck and installed on the wall of a building using a crane.

The ultimate benefit of the 200MP image sensor perhaps lies in how much can the user zoom in and crop without compromising on image quality.