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New Huawei Phone Has a 5x Optical Zoom, Thanks To a Periscope Lens (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Huawei officially announced the Huawei P30 Pro smartphone today. While it has a new Huawei-made SoC, an in-screen optical fingerprint reader, and lots of other high-end features, the highlight is definitely the camera's optical zoom, which is up to a whopping 5x. Not digital zoom. Real, optical zoom. Space, of course, is at a premium in smartphones. Imagine a smartphone sitting face down, and you would have to fit a vertical stack of the display, the CMOS sensor, and the lens all in about an 8mm height. There is just not a lot of room. But what if we didn't have to stack all the components vertically? The trick to Huawei's 5x optical zoom is that it uses a periscope design.
From the outside, it looks like a normal camera setup, albeit with a funky square camera opening. Internally, though, the components make a 90-degree right turn after the lens cover, and the zoom lens components and CMOS sensor are arranged horizontally. Now instead of having to cram a bunch of lenses and the CMOS chip into 8mm of vertical phone space, we have acres of horizontal phone space to play with. We've seen prototypes of periscope cameras from Oppo, but as far as commercial devices go, the Huawei P30 Pro is the first. While the optical zoom is the big new camera feature, there are four total cameras on the back of the P30 Pro. A 40MP main camera, a 20MP wide angle, the 8MP 5X telephoto, and a Time of Flight depth-sensing camera. The main 40MP camera uses a 1/1.7 inch-type sensor that, when measured diagonally, would make it 32 percent larger than the 1/2.55 inch-type sensors in the Galaxy S10 or iPhone XS. The P30 Pro also has a new "RYYB" pixel layout, which swaps out the two green pixels in most CMOS "RGGB" sensors for yellow pixels. "Huawei claims it can capture 40 percent more light, as the yellow filter captures green and red light," Ars Technica reports. "Of course, this will make the color wonky, but Huawei claims it can correct for that in software."
Other specifications include a Kirin 980 octa-core processor with 6GB or 8GB RAM, up to 512GB storage, IP68 water and dust resistance, NFC, wireless charging, 40W wired charging, and a 4,200mAh battery. It starts at a price of $1,125.
From the outside, it looks like a normal camera setup, albeit with a funky square camera opening. Internally, though, the components make a 90-degree right turn after the lens cover, and the zoom lens components and CMOS sensor are arranged horizontally. Now instead of having to cram a bunch of lenses and the CMOS chip into 8mm of vertical phone space, we have acres of horizontal phone space to play with. We've seen prototypes of periscope cameras from Oppo, but as far as commercial devices go, the Huawei P30 Pro is the first. While the optical zoom is the big new camera feature, there are four total cameras on the back of the P30 Pro. A 40MP main camera, a 20MP wide angle, the 8MP 5X telephoto, and a Time of Flight depth-sensing camera. The main 40MP camera uses a 1/1.7 inch-type sensor that, when measured diagonally, would make it 32 percent larger than the 1/2.55 inch-type sensors in the Galaxy S10 or iPhone XS. The P30 Pro also has a new "RYYB" pixel layout, which swaps out the two green pixels in most CMOS "RGGB" sensors for yellow pixels. "Huawei claims it can capture 40 percent more light, as the yellow filter captures green and red light," Ars Technica reports. "Of course, this will make the color wonky, but Huawei claims it can correct for that in software."
Other specifications include a Kirin 980 octa-core processor with 6GB or 8GB RAM, up to 512GB storage, IP68 water and dust resistance, NFC, wireless charging, 40W wired charging, and a 4,200mAh battery. It starts at a price of $1,125.
I own and really really like my fairly new Huawei Mate 20 (non Pro, curved displays can DIE!)
There's many great features on the phone, I like having an IR port, I have headphone, massive battery, very fast, notification LED.
It has allmost all the old original Android features that first wooooed me from Apple (which most idiot handset manufacturers are now removing to copy Apple....)
HOWEVER this phone, replaced a 2015 Samsung Note 5. Yet the camera's much like the p30, cameras everywhere,..... Those cameras? Yeah at least on the Mate 20 regular? They're kinda "ok"
It's sad that my old old Note 5 can take a brighter, crisper image AND it takes it without fiddling with pro mode stuff. I don't care if the mate can do fancy camera stuff, with patience, I just want a nice point and click to be honest.
I know they're improving all the time, but seeing that my almost brand new phone produce worse pics than my old one, kinda disappointing.
Does this phone ships with a Social Credit app preloaded?
Work in natural light?
And you pay the charge!
Corporatism != Free Market
Look back to a Minolta Dimagex.
Asus ZenFone Zoom.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A stupid ideal for such a small optical lens. People want telephoto lens you have to have a much bigger lens to work properly. I think now the smartphone engineers are flipping coins to see what sort of unique feature they can come up with. Again, I think people downgrade their experience for the form factor.
The article mentions "optical zoom" and "zoom lenses", but is this not simply a telephoto lens combined with 2 wide angle lenses? "Zoom" refers to a lens with a variable focal length, which this phone does not seem to have (nor any other smartphone I'm aware of, for that matter).
The P30 Pro also has a new "RYYB" pixel layout, which swaps out the two green pixels in most CMOS "RGGB" sensors for yellow pixels. "Huawei claims it can capture 40 percent more light, as the yellow filter captures green and red light," Ars Technica reports. "Of course, this will make the color wonky, but Huawei claims it can correct for that in software."
That's essentially what your retina does. The red and green photosensors (more accurately called L for "long-wave" and M for "medium-wave") have spectral sensitivity that largely overlap; it is the relative difference that gets resolved into red and green percepts (after a lot of additional processing).
So, yep, use high sensitivity sensors that mostly overlap in sensitivity, and then correct it in software. That's what your visual system does!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I'd wondered when this was coming for cell phone cameras. I had a Minolta DiMAGE X back in the day, it had a periscope lens with not just a fixed 5x telephoto, but a 3x zoom that moved inside the body sideways.
https://www.dpreview.com/artic...
I await the day they don't use 3 separate lenses/sensors and do something like this in a cell phone.
Sam
http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Minolta_DiMAGE_X
My UID is prime!
But wait... what if the insane camera quality in the phone was strategically added by Huawei so that they can leak even higher quality images to the Chinese government??
"The cause of fear is ignorance."
The DiMAGE X shipped 17 years ago. How likely is it that Huawei was sitting on this one for a couple years, waiting for Sony's patents to run out? (Sony bought Konica Minolta's camera unit in 2006.)
I wish a company would just tell their engineers, designers and ergonomic people sit in a room and be told to design the best phone ever. Treat it as brainstorming and see if anything comes out of it. Instead it's CEOs being afraid to invest in a different form factor that could crash.
You'd probably get a thicker phone to accommodate a better camera. I don't need a super thin phone like I have. Flat screen with a bubble back is fine for me.
Way kewlio, $1,125 to buy a nice phone and with software to raid my windows 10 kernel! They should offer that as a BOGOF offer (Buy-1-get-1-free) on 0dayz hahah
kekeke
I haven't seen the Huawei in action, but the way it used to work in old compact point-and-shoot it that the variable focal length happens by having the lens move around inside the periscope, instead of having them move in the external objective like on bigger photo cameras.
We'll have to wait until iFixit does a disassembly to see if indeed the lens are moving inside or whether it's only a telephoto with fixed focal length as you suggest and unlike every other thing of this kind that came before it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Minolta_DiMAGE_X
But the Huawei is on a smartphone !
and uses RYYB instead of RGGB !
(== hopefully that will be enough to avoid triggering some old patent and getting an injunction blocking the import of our phone in the patent-friendly countries such as US).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Corephotonics, an Israeli startup, holds several patents on this tech. It was first seen in the Oppo phone, and now the P30.
However, Corephotonics was acquired by Samsung 2 months ago for $155M, so this might be the last non-Samsung phone to have this technology.
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2019/02/huawei-p30-pro-quad-camera-teased.html
Ever since the Samsung's battery fiasco we owned six Huawei devices between me and my spouse -- two of mine were stolen, and my other half cracks the screen every other month. It's a nice quality package with a ~7" screen size that competition does not even offer.
Comes with a scuba diving case, you say? I will just wait for mine to be stolen... maybe book another trip to Barcelona where things magically vanish from your pockets.
Another phone with wear items (ie. battery) glued inside! Another piece of electronics designed to fail after a couple years!
Right-to-repair legislation banning the manufacturing/import-for-resale of devices into which wear items have been glued can't come soon enough.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Hope they left some room for the telemetry. It's a long way back to China.
When Huawei took away bootloader unlocking capabilities and has been very hostile to a custom ROM base, that does show that they have something to hide. At best, it might be some analytic stuff buried in /system. At worst, it is SoC level stuff for Chinese intel.
Either way, they don't like someone using their phone for their needs, which is a deal breaker. I can go to LG or Samsung and get something I can trust where the maker is not trying to hide, lock away, or obfuscate stuff.
What is the difference between 40MP with 5X digital zoom and 8MP with 5X optical zoom (or telephoto in this case it seems)?
Wouldn't you get about the same result?
Free unlimited data to China.
Great, so it can, what, zoom in on your personal information, making it easier to steal from you? Fuck that, fuck 'smartphones' in general, nothing but a big fat data security swiss-cheese.
The fancy new camera from Chinese Government-controlled company Hawaii, or HooHah WhatWhy (or whatever,) comes with a built-in smartphone! Apparently they have not yet mastered, or indeed even figured out the difficult, tricky technological challenge of how to include a headphone jack.
All the better to send spy pics back to daddy Xi.
It's a damn phone. Tell me when the technology improves around, you know, phone calls.
https://www.dpreview.com/artic...