Digital zoom for your smartphone camera is crap when you can have high quality optical zoom capabilities on your handset without the Nokia Lumia 1020’s hump. In case you missed it, Israeli company Corephotonics, has been showing off an exciting new technology which will mean thin phones with great photography capabilities.
For those who don’t know, digital zoom on your device means your camera can snap a normal picture and then use software to edit it internally and give you a bigger image of the subject within the frame. If you Photoshopped a photo by cropping out the edges and then enlarging it, the result would be similar. On the other hand, optical zoom needs moving parts where the lens actually slides forward to zoom in on your subject.
Because of the way in which optical and digital zoom works, you get higher qualities photos when using the former as compared to the latter. But Corephotonics employs the Snapdragon 800 platform by Qualcomm, special algorithms and two 13MP lenses to not just deliver optical zoom, but also ensure that there are no moving parts involved in the task. So we’re talking about a much smaller camera component which offers optical zoom of up to 5 times.
This is made possible because one lens is of the fixed-focus telephoto type with a narrow field of view, while its working partner is of the standard wide angle sort. Snapdragon 800 features a pair of Image Signal Processors which enables pictures from both cameras to be processed simultaneously. Low signal noise and sharper images can be clicked due to this system.
Corephotonics’ software compares the snaps captured by both cameras and uses the clearer pixels in the final result. The telephoto lens takes only black and white photographs so that more light is let in, while the wide angle lens gets the color images. And those fabulous HDR pictures can be clicked in one shot, unlike how it happens with current phone cameras.
Check out this CNET post which has more details on the Corephotonics technology that is set to land on smartphone cameras in 2014 and render high quality zoom capabilities to users.