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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.
Does this phone ships with a Social Credit app preloaded?
Look back to a Minolta Dimagex.
Asus ZenFone Zoom.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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).
It delivers excellent results when photographing engineering documents and prototypes. They never tested it on anything else.
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.
so? I don't live in China, wtf do I care that they know about my sexual fantasies of Xi and Winnie the Pooh?
You should worry about your OWN government spying on you, because it's them who can actually have any sort of meaningful impact on your life.
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
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
Looks like one of their engineers filed for a patent on this periscope design a few years ago: https://patents.google.com/pat... In the five minutes I took, I couldn't find the Konica Minolta patent, but I'd imagine it ran out right before this one got filed.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Nah this one is just a fixed 125mm-equivalent telephoto lens. So 5x isn't really accurate in the traditional sense but since the phone also has a wide-angle lens (and sensor), that's what it's relative to.
And it kind of makes sense because the end result from the end-user's point of view is the same - they press a button and the image zooms in, it's just achieved by blending the images from the different cameras rather than physically moving some lens elements.
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.
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?