The title doesn’t do it justice - everything with images quickly adds up.
Doing 120 fps video at 4K so that any chosen frame looks amazing without artifacts is really quite an achievement.
The microphones were actually more interesting to me, that you can get lavalier performance from the tiny mics in the phone that are physically far from the person being recorded is seriously clever.
Getting this to work some of the time is already an achievement but I think people underestimate how much work goes into making it work across all different scenarios.
jval43 8 minutes ago [-]
Dedicated cameras nowadays can push as much as 8k 60fps (twice the data over 4k120). Also every frame at full quality.
All that with less "perceptual testing" and better sensors/optics, photos look much better than the overprocessed look of iPhone photos.
The microphones are indeed the more impressive part. How smartphones seemingly get around physics by combining several tiny mics is crazy.
shrubble 3 hours ago [-]
This is really a puff piece - for instance, Nokia had a 1 billion pixels per second processing pipeline on their 808 PureView phone. In 2012.
CharlesW 2 hours ago [-]
Even so, the "camera first" Nokia 808 PureView took notably worse photos (DxOMark Mobile Photo score: 60) than the iPhone 7 (score: 86) and other flagship phones (Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge score: 86) of that time.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
what on cnet is not a puff piece?
mannyv 2 hours ago [-]
Two unanswered question: why not put the camera in the middle of the phone? And why do the cameras keep moving around?
kaonwarb 2 hours ago [-]
The space in the middle is dominated by a big battery in any smartphone I've seen. I suspect it would be less efficient to break that up.
klipt 2 hours ago [-]
I think I'd accidentally stick my thumb/finger in front of a central camera even more often than I already do with corner cameras!
snowwrestler 1 hours ago [-]
> why not put the camera in the middle of the phone?
This is one of those things that doesn't seem like it should matter, but it does. If the lens is mounted in the exact center of the body, the images come out looking unbalanced. To produce balanced images, you have to offset the lens. Even very expensive pro mirrorless bodies are offset; that is, if you look directly down the center of the lens, you'll notice there is more camera body sticking out on one side than the other.
This is called the chirality of the optical path and it is surprisingly difficult to predict analytically. Companies will typically design the optical path, prototype it, and mount it on a jig to precisely measure the chirality. From this, they design the body with the proper offset.
Chirality is more noticeable the smaller the sensor and the shorter the lens. So on smart phones, which put tiny sensors behind wide-angle lenses, they have to get the offset just right. This explains why the lenses are in slightly different places on the body every time Apple updates their cameras.
jval43 44 minutes ago [-]
Your comment makes no sense.
Every mirrorless body has a center marking for the middle of the sensor, so the camera can be mounted exactly centered on a tripod. It's actually important for photos to be exactly on axis if you want to do panoramas or stitching.
The only reason the body is not exactly symmetrical is engineering and ergonomics. Many point and shoots of the past in fact had the lens exactly in the center.
And "chirality of the optical path" is not anything related to this, in fact the term is not usable in this context at all.
nakedrobot2 50 minutes ago [-]
What on earth did I just read? Is this ai slop that I just read? None of this is correct or true.
Rendered at 07:03:17 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
Doing 120 fps video at 4K so that any chosen frame looks amazing without artifacts is really quite an achievement.
The microphones were actually more interesting to me, that you can get lavalier performance from the tiny mics in the phone that are physically far from the person being recorded is seriously clever.
Getting this to work some of the time is already an achievement but I think people underestimate how much work goes into making it work across all different scenarios.
All that with less "perceptual testing" and better sensors/optics, photos look much better than the overprocessed look of iPhone photos.
The microphones are indeed the more impressive part. How smartphones seemingly get around physics by combining several tiny mics is crazy.
This is one of those things that doesn't seem like it should matter, but it does. If the lens is mounted in the exact center of the body, the images come out looking unbalanced. To produce balanced images, you have to offset the lens. Even very expensive pro mirrorless bodies are offset; that is, if you look directly down the center of the lens, you'll notice there is more camera body sticking out on one side than the other.
This is called the chirality of the optical path and it is surprisingly difficult to predict analytically. Companies will typically design the optical path, prototype it, and mount it on a jig to precisely measure the chirality. From this, they design the body with the proper offset.
Chirality is more noticeable the smaller the sensor and the shorter the lens. So on smart phones, which put tiny sensors behind wide-angle lenses, they have to get the offset just right. This explains why the lenses are in slightly different places on the body every time Apple updates their cameras.
Every mirrorless body has a center marking for the middle of the sensor, so the camera can be mounted exactly centered on a tripod. It's actually important for photos to be exactly on axis if you want to do panoramas or stitching.
The only reason the body is not exactly symmetrical is engineering and ergonomics. Many point and shoots of the past in fact had the lens exactly in the center.
And "chirality of the optical path" is not anything related to this, in fact the term is not usable in this context at all.