Quick summary
Tecno – working with Samsung and Largan – has announced a couple of innovative smartphone lenses.
The new lenses are designed to boost camera performance in a smaller module.
One of the keys to Samsung's success is that it develops a lot of hardware itself. It's not only in just about every consumer electronics category there is, but it's also making a lot of the hardware that appears in their own and rival devices – from screens to memory to camera lenses.
Both of these lenses are designed to increase performance while making them more compact, so better designed for smartphone use.
The first is the Freeform Continuum Telephoto. This is designed to preserve sharpness across the full zoom range, rather than having a bias towards the native focal length of each lens which is what happens on multi-lens camera systems today.
So rather than have a 15, 23 and 70mm lens, for example, it will used advanced lens design to offer all that from one camera. This comes in the form of an Alvarez lens arrangement, where two lenses work together to create variable optical zoom.
The result is said to be sharp images across the full telephoto range, rather than at specific points. It also means there's a single camera module rather than three, allowing for better packaging of the camera on the back of the phone.
It sounds great, although existing variable zooms haven't been that impressive, like Sony's solution in top Xperia devices. Rivals are creating better results through AI processing than by advancing the optics, which raises a question over the need for such lenses.
That's not the only advancement, as a Dual-Mirror Reflect Telephoto has also been proposed as a future solution. Unlike the module above, this will replace the telephoto lens, but uses a mirror to fold the light between lenses. This – like the periscope lenses we're all familiar with these days – will use this mirror to increase the length of the light path in a smaller physical module.
This is said to create a doughnut bokeh, while also reducing the signal to noise ratio for cleaner images. It's a lens design that already exists for DSLR cameras, so the practicalities of this type of lens are better known.
While this announcement comes from Tecno, and could appear in a Tecno device, fans will be more interested to see if Samsung will adopt any of the technology itself for its Galaxy devices. It's certainly innovative and reducing the size of the camera modules is definitely something that Samsung should be interested in.
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