6 Major Improvements in Smartphone Cameras
The flagship phones of this year aimed to acquire public interest by taking the very best pictures. Some of such phone include the Google Pixel 4, Huawei Mate 30 Pro, and the Apple iPhone 11.
This year will have the trend in mobile photography, elevating advancements in high-resolution sensor tools, optical zoom potentials, and computational photography.
This year, you probably won’t have to spend a fortune to lay your hands on a decent camera phone. Last year’s flagship photography attributes will soon be this year’s affordable tools.
Here are the best features that you can expect from smartphone cameras.
1. The resolution wars continue
The adoption of the high-resolution camera sensor in mobile photography is one of the growing adoptions. We had our first 108MP smartphone, with Xiaomi Mi Note 10 and the underlying technology that made this possible is quad-CFA, quad-Bayer, or “pixel-binning” camera sensors.
Samsung is also introducing a 144MP camera sensor with 0.7um pixel sizes. Get ready for the megapixel wars to kick into full swing.
Even the individual pixels may be tiny, the size of these camera sensors is starting to creep up. Larger sensors capture more light which leads to more detail and better low-light pictures when taking shot in the pixel-binned or lower-resolution modes.
2. Super slow-motion and 8K video
In this year 960 frames per second slow motion and 8K video capture, though not unpopular, but they’re going to steal the show. The majority flagship smartphone will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 chip, boasts a more powerful image signal processor (ISP) to support these high bandwidth use cases.
3. “AI” photography gets smarter
The majority of the flagship smartphone will be dominated by AI cameras, or computational photography as a staple feature.
Phone’s astrophotography mode might be a bit of a niche, and Google uses it to pick out the sky in a night scene and then use multiple exposure processing to bring out the stars without overexposing the remaining image.
You will also find machine learning-based denoise algorithms are mostly used to clean up images in low light without losing too much detail.
Multi-frame HDR, software bokeh, and night modes will now be considered standard in modern smartphones, at more affordable price points.
4. Faster, more accurate and auto-focus
Auto-focus technology is a super-important camera the captures the best-looking motion action shots, record video, and even ensures that your landscape pictures are crisp and clear. You will find the high-end smartphones will use Sony’s 2×2 On-Chip Lens (OCL) sensor technology, which is also known as all pixel autofocus. This technology is useful for focusing on using very high-resolution sensors.
With 2×2 OCL, all of the pixels on the sensor are used for focus detection, improving horizontal autofocus detection which makes focus faster and more accurate than before.
5. Zoom will be wider
Towards the tail end of last year, some smartphones start including two optical zoom cameras. Started by the Xiaomi Mi Note 10, this idea with two telephoto cameras for close and long-range zoom will become the trend.
More cameras at different zoom levels fill in the quality gap between the primary camera and the long-range telephoto lens.
The high-end phones with advanced processing potential will also witness the growth of high-res main cameras and improvements in super-resolution zoom algorithms.
6. Great cameras will be the Focus
The size restrictions of the smartphone form factor will trigger more innovations in mobile camera capabilities. Hardware and software are going to improve once more, with high-resolution sensors and machine learning-based algorithms likely to play the major roles. Other features like lenses, post-processing algorithms, and user-facing apps will also play their subtle role in elevating the experience.
Triple and quad-camera setups, shooting flexibility and wide-angle and 5x optical zoom lenses will remain the part of the picture. The focus will return to the main camera once more, with greater detail, better low-light capture, and AI-enhanced imaging.
Synopsis
There are sufficient amazing phone cameras already on the market, but you must wait to see what has in store before upgrading.