Do Smartphone Cameras Have A Future?

According to the tech giant Sony, yes, they most certainly do. Some years ago, many photographers were ditching their DSLRs. Now Sony has predicted earlier this year that smartphone cameras will kill off DSLRs by 2024. While professional photographers currently appear to still favour DSLRs (or mirrorless cameras), smartphone cameras are set to improve in leaps and bounds in the next few years.

While smartphones with multiple lens systems have been around for a while, improvements cover the thorny issues of image stabilisation, higher resolutions, optical zooming, and a range of other features.

Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS)

Blurry images are a common problem for your average smartphone camera user. This is particularly the case in low-light conditions. Smartphone producers are tackling this problem with Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) technology, in which the lens freely floats inside the camera body, stabilising the image by moving the lens to counter shaky images.

The technology is constantly being improved with image technology company, TECNO, announcing plans to introduce the first Android phone with their sensor shift technology. The company says that compared to conventional OIS, its sensor shift will achieve up to 5,000 adjustments per second. That’s pretty fast and TECNO is aiming for a combination of OIS and sensor shift technology to increase stabilisation.

The Holy Grail Of Higher Resolutions

Almost 50% of smartphone cameras had megapixel (MP) sensors ranging from 48-64 MP in 2021. This soon shifted to 108MP, and a 200 MP sensor is due for release later this year. The higher the pixels, the greater the detail captured. But these pixels are small and therefore each capture less light, making for disappointing images.

Samsung is using algorithm-driven technology called pixel binning. This drives high-resolution sensors with a small pixel size to function better in low-light conditions. It does this by inducing smaller pixels to combine and act like larger pixels, letting in more light. This is like the human eye when the pupil dilates in low light conditions.

Continuous Optical Zoom

Everyone favours a sleek and elegant phone. But this leaves little room for bulky lenses. 2021’s periscope lenses produced 5x optical zoom. Predictions for 2022 include continuous optical zoom, allowing smartphone users who also enjoy playing at Grand Rush casino to switch between focal lengths smoothly, with image quality retained. Further advances for 2023 could see 10x zooming.

AI To Improve Portraits

Capturing the true skin tones of people of colour has often been a problem. Soon this may be a thing of the past with smartphone software incorporating large databases to faithfully reproduce literally thousands of dark skin tones.

That Tricky Depth Of Field

Smartphone cameras have never been very good at picking up edges or sensing depth. Enter improved Time of Flight (ToF) and Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS) enabling smartphone cameras to detect edges and generate 3D scene models. Enhanced and gradual blurring of backgrounds could become a standard feature in the future.

All in all, the future for smartphone cameras in 2022 looks very bright and looks set to remain on an upward trajectory with constantly evolving technology.