The price of RAM has risen more than 50% in price over the last year, and your camera will be one of the first victims. If you thought that this crisis was only going to make you pay more for your phone, get ready: it will also degrade the quality of the photos you take with it. And the most disturbing thing is that many brands are already making silent decisions in this regard.
What you need to know before continuing:
- DRAM memory shortage is primarily driven by demand for artificial intelligence
- The memories already represent up to 40% of the manufacturing cost from a low-end smartphone
- Some manufacturers are reducing the size of the photo sensor to offset costs
- More AI in the tool does not fully compensate for a smaller sensor
This is not a passing market fluctuation. It is a structural change that is shaking the entire mobile device manufacturing chain since the beginning of 2026, and its consequences go far beyond the closing price in the store.
Why RAM has so much to do with the photos you take
Here comes the part that many people don’t know, and that manufacturers prefer not to advertise: The camera of your mobile depends directly on the RAM to function well. It’s not just a matter of how many megapixels the sensor has. The real work happens after you press the button.
Because? Because functions like HDR processing, computational zoom, AI portrait mode, and RAW file processing They need to move huge amounts of data in precise time, and all that flow goes through RAM. The same goes for 4K video recording or algorithms that improve photos in low light conditions.
Without enough RAM memory—or with slower RAM because it was made cheaper to reduce costs—, These processes slow down, lose quality or become unavailable altogether..
Look at what’s happening with him. Samsung Galaxy A57 5G: Its launch price is noticeably higher than that of the A56, but the jump in photographic hardware is not proportional. The explanation lies in the margins: the increase in the cost of RAM is being absorbed somewhere, and that place is usually the sensor or optics.
Instead, Samsung made a different decision with the Galaxy A37 5G, where improved essential sensor —going from 1/1.96 to 1/1.56 inches— to justify the price increase to the consumer. But that is not the norm, but the exception.
The silent trap: smaller sensors to offset costs
The movement that most worries the sector comes from the supply chains themselves. Filters with a solid track record of success, such as Mounted Focal point Digital, suggest that The trend towards ever-larger photo sensors could be coming to an end. The logic is brutal in its simplicity: if manufacturing the phone is already more expensive because of the DRAM and NAND memory, something has to give. And that “something” is the sensor.
The difference between a high-end sensor and a more modest one is not always obvious to the average user, especially if the brand compensates with more aggressive tools and improved AI algorithms. But for serious photographers—good color dynamics, realistic night shots, video with wide color range— The degradation is noticeable, no matter how much the AI tries to hide it..
Brands like Qualcomm and MediaTek are pushing for their chips to process more with less available memory, and Apple has been optimizing its photography pipeline for years to squeeze every byte of RAM. But even with those optimizations, there is a physical limit that the tool cannot exceed.
More AI, less sensor: the trade-off that they won’t tell you about
The most plausible scenario for the remainder of 2026 is this: More modest photo sensors offset by greater AI processing. It’s a technically interesting bet—the tool is becoming more and more important in mobile photography—but it’s also an elegant way to cut back on hardware without making the user immediately worth it.
The bottom line is this: the same memory chips that go inside your phone are the ones needed by the data centers that power ChatGPT, Gemini, and all the AI models you use every day. That demand doesn’t stop, supply is tight, and companies like SK Hynix have already admitted that the shortage could extend until the end of 2027
For the entry range, the outlook is especially worrying: sector estimates suggest that memories could represent up to 40% of the entire manufacturing cost of a cheap smartphone towards the end of this year. That leaves very little room to invest in a good camera module, and even less to compete on price.
Are you willing to pay more for a cell phone that takes worse photos than the previous model? Because in many cases, that is exactly what the market is going to offer you in the coming months, although no one at the product presentation is going to tell you in those words.
Keep reading:
• How much RAM should your next phone have?
• RAM or storage: what should you spend your money on when buying a laptop?
• Expand the RAM of your laptop: the definitive guide to speed up your computer
