[wnkrshm]

There are many more clever methods that one can use with CMOS that fall under computational photography or optics.

One very interesting one is ptychography (in microscopy often Fourier ptychography, since you can use Fourier optics to describe the optical system [0]), which uses a model of an optical system to get an image (iirc x7-x10 resolution) out of many blurry images, while knowing a bit about the optics in front of your image sensor - it can also work in remote sensing to some degree (better with coherent illumination though).

Edit: This is not just averaging or maxing pixels, it reconstructs the image using reconstructed phase information from having low-res pictures with different, known illumination or camera positions.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hece_x37ITg

[londons_explore]

I think ptychography is the future of phone cameras... You'll see phones with 1000 lenses and 1000 CCD's, across the whole back of the phone.

They'll all be manufactured as a one piece glass moulding and single CCD chip - and the whole thing will be very cheap to make, having moved all the difficulty into software.