California startup Pelican Imaging wants to put slimmer, higher-quality cameras into cellphones with its new camera-array technology. Instead of using a single lens and sensor, the camera uses an array of smaller modules and uses computation to combine them into a single image. The resulting hardware is thin, but that is probably the least interesting thing about it.
The Pelican array uses “light-field photography”, and aside from just stitching small pictures into a big one, it does some things a regular camera can’t. For instance, you can diddle with the picture after it is taken, blurring a background, say. And in principle at least, you could use a kind of 3D “healing brush” to paint out distractions behind and in front of your subject.
Pelican’s camera also promises to give high resolution images with low-noise results in low-light situations, and could enable gesture-controls on tablets.
The tech is being sold into the industry, not to consumers, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that Apple will buy this and use it to replace the crappy camera in its skinny iPod Touch.
But Samsung has their own camera too.
What the world needs now is more pixels up in your phone, and Samsung has a selection of new offerings that offer just that for stills and vids. It’s released details on two new sensors, one,
the S5K3H2, clocking in at eight megapixels and the other, the S5K3L1, at 12.
Both will record 1080p video, with the 12 megapixel offering doing it at up to
60 fps — the lesser model makes do with a mere 30. Both can capture full-res
stills at 30fps and, naturally, both are really tiny for fitting into things
like smartphones.