Hello,
I was just wondering you know…
why does Theta Z1 has only Photos 23MP ? My smartphone has twice that…(48MP)
Any ideas ? Thanks for your comments…
The 48mp is likely 12MP with 4x pixel binning.
Well, the new Sony sensor actually has 48 effective megapixels. (The binning is used to reduce resolution in order to reduce the noise common with tiny pixel sizes such as 0.8 um. Its not interpolation to fake a higher resolution.)
But in this case we are talking about sensor pixels with each of them being sensitive to only a single of the three base colors. Therefore, the actual chroma resolution after de-bayering and creating the output image is significantly lower.
On the other side, the 23 MP of the Z1 are the output pixels after de-bayering and also stitching as well as remapping into equirectangular projection.
So, to avoid comparing apples to oranges you should compare the resolution of the two sensor designs. The Z1 has two sensors with 20 MP each, i.e. a total of 40 MP, almost the same resolution of the Sony sensor. Even better, the Z1 pixels a significantly larger than those of the Sony sensor!
So the Sony if better than Ricoh ? (I am kinda lost here…)
Sony cost more money ?
What are you comparing here?
Ricoh’s sensor with Sony’s sensor?
A phone camera with Sony’s sensor with Ricoh’s spherical camera Z1?
The brand Ricoh with the brand Sony?
Apples with oranges?
And what do you mean with ‘better’?
Resolution?
Dynamic range?
Noise ratio?
Field of view?
Physical dimension?
Smell?
…?
I am kinda lost here … 
The article below has some information on the image sensor design choices and benefits. The noise reduction may be better due to larger sensor and larger pixels.