Sony, Samsung & OmniVision
Whatever camera you buy, the part that sees is Japanese.
Sony makes roughly half the image sensors in the world, and its sensors sit inside cameras from companies that compete with Sony — including, for some models, European ones. Samsung is second and OmniVision, now Chinese-owned, third. Europe is not absent from photonics: ams-OSRAM in Austria and STMicroelectronics make optical, time-of-flight and specialist sensors, and European scientific and space imaging is genuinely strong. None of them makes the main sensor in a phone or a consumer camera, which is why the cameras card can offer you Leica and Phase One but not a European sensor.
What you are replacing (3)
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Sony Semiconductor ↗
Atsugi. About half the global image sensor market.
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Samsung ISOCELL ↗
Hwaseong. Second by volume.
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OmniVision ↗
Santa Clara-founded, owned by Will Semiconductor of Shanghai since 2019.
European alternatives (0)
Suggest another →There is no European alternative to this.
Not an unfinished card: we looked, and nothing in Europe does this at a scale you could actually switch to. It is here so the gap is visible — these are the places where something is missing rather than merely losing.
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