High tech innovation in a mobile phone - A great camera

There is no doubt that camera is the most essential feature of the range of the mobile phones available on the earth and each smartphone manufacturer is competing with a rival like wolves fight. Four key events set the pace for each year’s smartphone camera innovations: Samsung’s February Galaxy Unpacked, Apple’s September iPhone event, Google’s October Made by Google event, and Qualcomm’s December Snapdragon Tech Summit. While the first three events focus entirely on products for the current year, Qualcomm’s is uniquely about what’s coming up next, though other announcements sometimes obscure the camera news.

On day one, the company promised the chip will deliver “gigapixel image processing” and 8K video capture capabilities, and on day two, it promised real Snapdragon 865 devices in early 2020, including a 200-megapixel camera in actual smartphones at some point next year.

 The camera is depending on many aspects of mobile phones:

1.       The (great) status quo: hardware

There is no direct winner unlike cannon and Nikon in smartphones and as DXOMARK, all smartphone companies are quoting themselves as “Best smartphone camera” and the award is meaningless. Every year, Apple’s flagship phone cameras have fewer megapixels than top rivals, emphasizing ease of use and pixel quality over quantity.

AI-assisted image stabilization and subject tracking automation are also becoming critical features in both smartphone photography and videography. 

2.       Computational photography:

It’s increasingly apparent that computational photography — the combination of multiple images and related sensor data — is going to be the next big thing in smartphone cameras. Google and Apple have spent the past several years leveraging their phones’ computer-like chips to produce real-time photo and video results that dedicated cameras can’t offer, and the results are increasingly impressive. 

 Coming soon: 200-megapixel cameras, 8K videos, and 3D scanning

Assuming that it only has a 1X optical zoom lens, this 108-megapixel sensor would capture more detail than a 10-megapixel sensor with a 10X lens. And Qualcomm is promising that there will be actual 200-megapixel sensors inside Snapdragon 865 phones in 2020 — nearly twice that quantity of detail. This isn’t to say that every camera sensor’s pixels are created equal — they’re not — or that devices snapping 200-megapixel photos will offer anything close to the speed and other capabilities of devices (such as iPhones) with fewer pixels to handle.