It comes up fairly often in other topics. Smartphones have been taking market away from traditional photographic devices for more than a decade. Highly advanced computational photography paired with ever-shrinking optical components continue the trend. What’s new? What’s next? Discuss it here.
Here come the 1-inch sensors, encroaching on the low-end “real” cameras such as the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100, the current model going for $1000.
The smartphones have better computational capabilities but the Sony still has things like an electronic viewfinder, possibly the feature I miss most.
There was also the Nikon One with interchangeable lenses. Discontinued.
If only one of these giants would bring liquid lens technology to the gate so we could forget about big camera bulge and go back to flat (or near flat) slabs that make me fully and finally retire my Lumix FZ300 bridge camera.
2 Likes
Problem with a lot of these current 1in sensor phones, like the Sony Xperia Pro & Xiaomi is they aren’t making full use of the 1in sensor & are close to like 3/4" sensor. OTOH I think the Panasonic CM1 phone from around 2014 is making use of the full 1in sensor.
2 Likes
“LG Innotek claims that the Optical Telephoto Zoom Module is capable of 4x-9x optical zoom without quality degradation.”
Also without the big bump. This is an actual optical zoom lens module (I think; it’s not clear; might be a 4x + 9x), not just a fixed-magnification telephoto (often incorrectly called a “zoom”).
So it’s a parfocal lens then?
I reckon it’ll work, but that there’ll be some significant drawbacks that’ll make it a choice between better image quality or convenience and size.
Liquid lens seems to me to be the obvious future if they can get it to perform in reality like it does in theory as it’s a way to provide both the benefits of both aspherical and ED (nlkon) or LD(canon) elements in current optical configurations
Baby steps. We’ll get there.
cool phone, wish they would still make hybrid camera smartphones like that (lumia 1020 and that samung compactcamera phone also come to mind).