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Sony CEO Lets Slip That iPhone 5 Will Have 8MP Camera
An anonymous reader writes "During a recent interview with Walt Mossberg, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer may have inadvertently let it slip that Sony plans to supply Apple with 8 megapixel cameras for the next-gen iPhone. While discussing the Japanese earthquake, Stringer noted that Sony's camera sensor plant in Sendai had been affected and that shipments of 8 megapixel camera sensors to Apple were subsequently delayed."
What an unfortunate "slip"!
Who cares?
I think you mean "inadvertently".
This is news?
More megapixels means more noise if you don't increase the size of the detector.
The Zune MHD will have a QSXGA, 60fps cam, not impressed. ...
Shit, did I just let that slip?
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
This rumor isn't credible. 8MP is a bad idea unless you make the lens and sensor bigger. The trouble is, as you increase the megapixels you reduce the amount of light the sensor can collect. Creating significantly poorer photos in low light conditions and slightly poorer photos in normal conditions.
If you have a huge lens and sensor, like some phones and like a point-and-shoot camera then 8MP (or more) is a great idea. But apple isn't likely to do either of those.
They already made the lens and sensor about as good as they could in the iPhone 4. I think we're a long time away from seeing an 8MP iPhone camera.
You do realize, that other than raw numbers, megapixels have very little to do with final quality?
More of a surprise to me is thats its going to be called an iPhone 5 instead of an iPhone 4x
Although I grant that the megapix race is ultimately futile, there are plenty of other specs on which iPhone competitors have settled into a comfortable pattern of too little, too late.
For example, the recently announced Palm Pre 3 will have a resolution of 800x480, which is about half the pixels of the iPhone 4's 960x640.
So when are Android manufacturers and Palm/HP going to start competing with the next iPhone iteration instead of the previous one? I'm leaving Nokia out of this due to utter incompetence and failure to deliver.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You do realize that cellphone sensors are limited by diffraction so while you can resolve finer detail through unsharp masks, physics does limit the usable resolution of optical sensors. Making things worse, the need for anti-aliasing filters will further soften the photos. APS-C DSLRs have reached the point where they are diffraction limited to f/8.0 and yet while the megapixel race has slowed down a bit, it has not yet ended. If you need a 100% crop from the newest APS-C cameras, it requires minor to moderat sharpening during postprocessing. As the sensor size decreases the circle of confusion becomes relatively larger as the photo sites ("pixels") decrease.
Unless they find some way to increase the lens size (which will require bending space-time) the megapixel race is utterly pointless, because the resulting photos will either appear softer and softer, or more and more artificial due to requiring more and more sharpening.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
In other news, not a shit was given that at the interview...
Megapixels are meaningless if they aren't coupled with a larger sensor and better glass. Cheap plastic and a tiny sensor still make it a shitty camera. It's the same picture whether it's 4Mp or 8Mp. Now if they put a real Xenon flash on it, that might be something interesting.
I think you mean September 2010, not 3 years ago, and the megapixels are irrelevant without a quality sensor behind it.
Take for example the current crop of Sony 16 mp APS sensors found in the Nikon D7000 and Pentax K-5 versus any APS sensor before them, for example the 6 mp sensors that were the high iso darlings of their day.
A tablet that takes pictures, WOW!
Parent should not have been modded down. There is a world of difference between "troll" and "mindless fanboy".
For fans of amateur pr0n *fap fap fap fap fap*
Making things worse, the need for anti-aliasing filters will further soften the photos.
Soften? Pastelify, blur, undetailify, and just generally fuck up are terms that much better describe what noise reduction filters in typical cell phone cameras do to pictures. :(
I want a 1.3-2MP sensor in my next phone...
I care because I didn't know that Sony supplied components to Apple. Maybe I have just been living in a cave or something....but I didn't know.
And now that I DO know, Apple is on my do-not-buy list.
I hate Sony THAT much. And you should too.
The subject says it ...
Expect more of the same kind of "upgrades" if poor Steve doesn't get back to the firm soon.
And how many apps does it have? Must be plenty seeing how Nokia is jumping to Windows Phone 7.
The quality of the software that processes the data coming from the sensor is vitally important to the quality of the image produced.
This has been amply demonstrated by some DSLR's that use the same Sensor and almost identical quality lenses only to have a vast difference in the quality (bokeh) of the resulting image.
This is why you pay lots of $$$$ to the likes of Nikon & Canon and less to Sony especially as Sony make most of the Nikon DSLR Sensors.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
3 years ahead in camera technology, 6 years behind in smartphone OS technology!
Apple puts cameras in everything, how can you extrapolate that this is for an iPhone? What's the sensor that apple puts in iMacs? Macbooks? Cinema Displays?
Now that it has been slipped, that feature will now be dropped like every other feature that has been leaked in the past.
The game.
Doesn't sound like a big issue -- I've been bending space-time around me since the day when I was born.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Seeing that all latest Sony Ericsson phones also come with the 8MP Exmor sensor.
So is Steve Jobs going to throw a tantrum and terminate Sony like he's done before when a component maker lets something slip?
It depends on whether or not Steve Jobs throws a hissy fit.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/00/07/19/apple_turns_cold_shoulder_towards_ati_at_macworld.html
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
I imagine that there will be lots of heads exploding over this if it's true. Does this mean that the hate camp will start boycotting Apple? Or will the fanbois start supporting Sony because of Apple's involvement? Or due to aforementioned, will it simply not matter due to the big 'ol pile of mess on the floor?
(Popcorn at the ready!)
Why would Apple get 8mp Sensors? When the len's infront of them will be awful? What i want to see is a little tiny Lecia or the like lens built into the iPhone, then we get good good glass= good image. Simples
pixon was released 1st qtr 2009. so its 2 years and change.
It's taken something like 7 or 8 years for compact camera manufacturers to realize (or, perhaps, "come to grips with" is better) that shoving more megapixels into a tiny sensor doesn't give the user better photos. Unfortunately the phone manufacturers apparently haven't learned that lesson.
Actually I am probably being unfair. They're just giving the customers what they want, and - even here on Slashdot - I still see people saying things like "my phone has a 6MP sensor, so it's better than an iPhone's camera". Frankly, these phone cameras are mediocre at best.
Thing is, with the sensor size, lens size, and lens quality... I will hazard a guess that the maximum true resolution any of these phone cameras can resolve is more on the order of two or three megapixels - and THAT is assuming the subject is well lit!
#DeleteChrome
I care because I didn't know that Sony supplied components to Apple. Maybe I have just been living in a cave or something....but I didn't know.
And now that I DO know, Apple is on my do-not-buy list.
I hate Sony THAT much. And you should too.
If you plan to never buy any Sony anything ever, then you're probably not going to ever buy any electronic device ever. Your next phone/laptop/TV may well have a Sony battery or a Sony CCD or a Sony LCD panel.
Sony is, it turns out, a very big company.
Most people, I think, don't even know what a megapixel is so why should they care about it?
Meh, phone cameras suck in general, high mega-pixels are mostly just for advertising (the optics are too poor to really take advantage of them). Apple has enough other good points to advertise on and enough fanboys that they really don't need to play the game of inflating a headline spec while actually reducing what that spec is thought the represent (put too many megapixels on for your optics and you just increase noise without increasing details).
What apple really got right was the interface and in particular the web browser. Mobile phones have had web browsers before but afaict they sucked and were little used. By combining a really good multi-touch screen with a good browser engine apple created a mobile browser that people actually wanted to use.
Similarly symbian could support user apps but it was horrible to code for (based on a basterdised version of C++) and there was no central place to distrubute apps. The iphone didn't initially support user apps at all but when they did add support they did it in a way that brought them a huge number of developers.
I don't like the way apple locks their phones down or the way they make the batteries difficult to replace but they got many things right with the iPhone. Things other smartphone vendors rushed to copy.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Maybe they could use a lens which pops out of the back of the camera when in use?
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A very high quality lens will only help if the scene is very bright. At other times, the small aperture means you get stuck with excessive noise or motion blur regardless of the quality of the lens.
Did anyone actually try to figure the difference, if at all? I suspect that anything above 5 is simply marketing driven nonsense.
If there's areas on a computing device that you can't really improve, and you still want people to plod along the upgrade path, just bump the numbers - like in the ca. 2000 "Mhz wars".
...Well, this is Slashdot. You might already know.
But if you don't, well, now you know how hardware folks feel. HURR IT HAZ MOR MAGAHURTZ IT MUST B BETTAR.
*sigh* People are stupid. It doesn't matter the subject - processors, cameras, cars, medicine, food. People are stupid.
Nice to hear that Apple missing that particular boat by perhaps a year or two is News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters.
So many people buy into the myth that >MP automatically means less noise.
This would be true if you took the same sensor technology from a year or two ago and just double the number of photosites to double the resolution of the sensor. You would indeed get a noisy image. But they don't do that. A lot of money is spent developing new sensor tech and this allows smaller photosites (hence more per sensor) which will allow you to yield higher MP sensors without increase in noise characteristics. This is why my 18MP Canon 7D blows my old 10MP 400D out of the water in low light. You also have to remember that if you downsize the 18MP image to the 10MP equivalent you also get even further reduction in noise...
You also state that the amount of light collected falls - you don't reduce the amount of light the sensor can collect at all. You reduce the number of photons per photosite (same amount of light hits the same area but you will indeed get less light per pixel). As I mentioned before though newer technology has improved per pixel performance. The physical size of the lens also isn't that important it's more about the quality of the glass and resolving power (I had a relatively small 50 1.4 prime, an old super tak, that takes astonishing photos and it is waaay smaller than some very mediocre lenses).
Perhaps taking the sensor tech in the 8MP sony camera and making a 5MP version might produce slightly less noise but you can bet the new 8MP camera has less noise than the old 5MP one....
People are just so keen to sound like an expert and jump on the "more is not better" bandwagon, so sad.
what if the 8mp isn't going in the iPhone but into an iPod/Camera device that is as much camera (better lens flash etc.) as it is iPod?
Yeah, I'm glad you agree re: Nokia at least. Unfortunately, it seems that to some /.'ers who happen to have mod points today, calling a spade a spade regarding iPhone competitors is trolling.
So, in the world that today's mods live in, iDevice competitors have actually got their act together? Even if they could manage to come out with something with higher specs in all features than a given iDevice, there's still inertia to deal with. But what's amazing is they come out with inferior phones and pads, and then expect to compete.
I don't know who I offended: Nokia, Android, or WebOS fans? The fact is, I am a fan of better open devices, the more open the better. And the way to get their is through criticism, not closing your eyes and shouting "I can't hear you."
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
It's a tiny cheap camera. It will have a cheap sensor and a cheap lens. It may be better than a 3 year old Nokia N95, but it will still be a bad camera.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Tne N8's 12 MP camera has a ginormous sensor that produces absolutely amazing quality pictures, even better than the vast majority of point and shoot cameras.
so iPhone finally gets what most other smartphones already offer. Par for the course, no secret.
Metamaterials, superlenses ...?
Probably not any more once Steve hears about it. iP5 will probably have a 6 MP camera from another vendor.
We're already at the point in APS sensors where diffraction limits are kicking in at f8... that's APS-C at 18Mpixels. We don't see it yet, though, because they're all doing Bayer interpolation, which increases the effective circle of confusion by about a factor of 9. So there's still some practical resolution to be had in APS sensors, but it's not going on forever.
The ironic thing here is that, assuming Sigma/Foveon ever get their act together on an RGB (three sensors per pixel site) senor chip with a modern spatical resolution, they'll be just in time to still suck, due to diffraction.
-Dave Haynie
Supposedly about a 1/2" sensor (you have to know about the history of videcon tubes and other ancient video stuff to know about sensor measurements... anyone who just gets out a rules and measures will get the wrong answer). That's not bad. Higher end P&S cameras like the Canon G12 or Nikon P7000 usually rock something like a 1/1/7" sensor.
Moving upward, the Panasonic and Olympus DSLR, EVIL, and ILCC's sport 4/3" sensor... APS-C, APS-H, and full frame 35mm move up from there. Looking in the other direction, cheaper P&S cameras from reputable companies go down to about 1/2.5", which is also close the largest sensor you'll find in a consumer camcorder (I think JVC have a few at 1/2.3").
Some of the "Flip" style webcam devices have used the same 1/4" sensor you usually find in a cellphone, and a lens to match. But they better of these have slightly better sensors today, the reasonably-good-for-a-Flip-clone Kodak ZI8 has a 1/2.5" sensor. Though the N8 still bests those.
To bad Nokia's dumping all their interesting stuff for a cozy spot in bed with Microsoft on Window 7 Phone.
-Dave Haynie
Lucky only 8 of these megapixel sensors have been delayed. The other 10 million of them will be delivered on time.
... and rootkit