“I’ve got an iPhone 6 Plus, and there’s no getting around an obvious fact: The camera is pretty great,” Mike Elgan reports for Computerworld. “Because camera superiority is often a major reason why people buy a company’s highest-end phones, the industry is in a quandary: How can they dramatically improve what are already great phones, even as smartphones are getting thinner and thinner?”
“Apple this week revealed its direction: multi-aperture computational imaging. That’s photography mumbo jumbo that means using more than one camera combined with software that creates a picture from the resulting data,” Elgan reports. “The revelation about Apple’s direction came in the form of Apple’s $20 million acquisition of an Israeli startup called LinX Computational Imaging.”
“Because the LinX camera system is capturing images from more than one angle, and also mapping the distance of every object and surface in the shot, it can do amazing things far beyond simply taking great photos,” Elgan reports. “The LinX depth map can speed up and improve the quality of auto-focus. And if you don’t like the image captured with auto-focus, you can refocus the image after it’s been taken! You could replace or remove the background of not only a photo, but also a live video — in real time. It would work like a green screen, but no green screen would be required. Any background could be replaced… We could be using it by the end of the year!”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The world’s best smartphone camera is poised to get markedly better!
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