From what I&#x27;ve watched about CMOS sensors and I could be mistaken, the comparison could be similar to making your CPU registers smaller but ramping the frequency of how often you access hit them (which is akin to increased framerate). So the net amount of captured light is the same, but you have many more frames now.<p>With sophisticated software (or onboard hardware) this can be reassembled to the same picture as well. And you are looking at this a bit wrong way. On mobile devices - your bottleneck is lens size, so you have to have smaller pixels.<p>Now if your pixels are large, the register (I think they are called wells on CMOS sensors) has to pull in much more information at higher power requirements which introduces noise which you have to &quot;mask&quot; with even more photon energy? Again, I could be getting this totally wrong and of course it&#x27;s best to have big lens with lots of pixels.