An Israeli company has caught Samsung’s eye which is looking to buy it for $150 million as it might help it revolutionize the cameras in its smartphones.
The firm is called Corephotonics, and it specializes in folded camera optics. This way camera lenses will be turned into a sort of periscope.
Even tough wide-angle and telephoto lenses are mounted on phone’s rear there is no room for zoom lenses, and this is why we do not have them. In order for the image to be adjusted, a zoom lens needs to move the lens elements.
This issue is solved by folded camera optics because they move the sensor. It is inside the phone body instead of being directly behind the lenses ad the light will be reflected by a prism to hit the sensor.
A prototype phones that features a 5x zoom was shown off by Oppo, a Chinese company, during the Mobile World Congress this year and they want to double that.
A production model featuring this technology has not been released yet by the company, and this might be a sign that it is not ready for the mass market yet.
The binary wide or telephoto options are great, but there are some additional advantages that the zoom comes with. That includes the fact that it can adjust the frame to show the potential of the subject photographed.
If the same technology that Oppo has demoed will be adopted by Samsung, it means that the Galaxy S11 and Note 10 will feature it.
Being done with lenses and not digitally, zooming in offers the picture better quality. We can zoom in using the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S9, but the quality is being lost the more we zoom in to get a closer look at something.
Daniel Kiss is the senior editor for News Lair. Daniel was working as a writer since he finished high-school, first for local papers then he started online, nowadays he likes to write about the latest games and tech innovations.