iPhone 7 Camera?

[Jose Mojica]

Apple will be announcing the iPhone 7 on September 7th. Here's the picture of the invite they sent out... The Verge has been disecting the meaning of the image and their guess is that the emphasis will be on a new camera.

From the Verge: "...the focus for this upcoming iPhone event will be the camera. That’s why we’re treated to the "See you" language and those pretty multicolored spheres. The latter are there to simulate bokeh, the appealing look of out-of-focus areas in photos with shallow depth of field."

What do you guys think? A big sensor 4K camera that shoots RAW? Jarred, are we going to see you on stage Sept. 7th? Maybe that's why RED's new lineup is in October, they're going to be really busy until the end of September .

 

[Wayne Morellini]

You have seen the Red Smartphone patent. It talks about the modular phone. But they show apparently two phones, one not modular.

Now, there is talk of a multiple sensor IPhone coming to emulate digital stills performance.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/14/apple-acquires-linx-imaging/

The spacing of the two lens are too close together to match full frame. The benefit of this technology is you can space tjrm to compete with medium format (but then issues with fingers over a lens). But it is said to be two lenses, but four is needed.

 

[Antony Newman]

I guess the '7' is to enforce iPhone 7 ... And not 6 SE.

Apple have been busy 'crunching' large numbers of images (which takes oodles amount of CPU) in a 'machine learning' phase to tune their recognition algorithms (which can work within the confines of GPU and hardware assistance of the iPhone).

This next version of iOS will 'see' limited vocabulary. Apps will be able to 'hear' a limited vocabulary too.
-> "get the the picture I took last year where everyone was grinning in the rain"

Future Tech : If they can leverage the ARM SVE extension for realtime visual comprehension and learning, I would guess Apple will repeat history and design this in silicon even before ARM (or Fijitsu) do.

AJ

 

[Jose Mojica]

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/14/apple-acquires-linx-imaging/

The spacing of the two lens are too close together to match full frame. The benefit of this technology is you can space tjrm to compete with medium format (but then issues with fingers over a lens). But it is said to be two lenses, but four is needed.

Interesting...so they're going to use two cameras and software to try to create a 3D map. Is that the idea? So then they can identify the background from the foreground and simulate things like shallow DOF. Maybe even replace the background in a picture or change the focus. I wonder how far they're going to take it and whether any of those things will work with video.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

The image blur is a 3D phenomena, 2 cameras don't get around the image in the vertical plane to shape the blur from that direction. With out eyes, they get rays around objects because of the spacing, working better. But to shape blur like a large lens with the verticle information, you need extra lens. Now you can still get a dof effect. Frankly, if it only was 4 lenses spaced at the corners of a full frame, or Imax frame, it would be great.

Many years sgo I wanted to do this, thought I was on something new, but it turns out it goes back to around 1923 when the original maths was proposed, but I can do it like 100x faster, maybe a lot more.

 

[Joel Arvidsson]

Apple takes more baby steps forward. Small upgrades for each generation.

 

[Jose Mojica]

One thing that they hardly talked about, but mentioned briefly, was that it was possible for iPhone 7 apps to capture RAW data in DNG format using the API. Later they showed Adobe Lightroom for iPhone 7 editing a RAW image. That's huge I think. I know this won't happen soon, but I wonder if an app could capture RAW video. Does the iPhone 7 have enough juice to capture 24 fps 4K RAW?

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Does the iPhone 7 have enough juice to capture 24 fps 4K RAW?

No, RAW stills and RAW motion have highly different demands on hardware.

 

[Jose Mojica]

No, RAW stills and RAW motion have highly different demands on hardware.

I was just wondering how many calls to the API (AVCapturePhotoOutput I believe), which can return a compressed RAW DNG file still frame, can you call per second. That new A10 processor is pretty fast. Maybe not fast enough for 4K 24 fps RAW, but maybe 2K or 1080p? Essentially, isn't that what Blackmagic cameras do? They output every frame as a separate DNG image.

 

[Levi Arnold]

I was just wondering how many calls to the API (AVCapturePhotoOutput I believe), which can return a compressed RAW DNG file still frame, can you call per second. That new A10 processor is pretty fast. Maybe not fast enough for 4K 24 fps RAW, but maybe 2K or 1080p? Essentially, isn't that what Blackmagic cameras do? They output every frame as a separate DNG image.

And those cameras get kinda warm...RAW video would really heat up the phone and drain the battery. RAW video isn't something we'll see for awhile I don't think because the mass majority of people wouldn't benefit from it. It's a photographers tool mainly.

 

[Sabyasachi Patra]

And those cameras get kinda warm...RAW video would really heat up the phone and drain the battery. RAW video isn't something we'll see for awhile I don't think because the mass majority of people wouldn't benefit from it. It's a photographers tool mainly.

The question is whether some Magic lantern type of guys can hack it or create an App to get raw video for brief shots. I remember when iPhone didn't have 4K video, someone had done app to record 4K video.

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I think the 7 Plus' dual camera is a step in the right direction. Huawei's P9's dual camera is a very different thing, which would arguably deliver better wide-angle black and white images than the iPhone.

However... the iPhone's portrait lens (well, short portrait lens) is for many a better feature. You double the focal length while retaining 12Mpx worth of resolution. After you crop a wide-angle photo so that the FOV is the same as the portrait photo, you will be left with 3Mpx. And those are not the highest quality pixels you can get.

 

[Antony Newman]

I don't think Apple will expose access to the hardware Direct Memory Access (DMA) to move 'real raw' image data around.

Even an old 'A' chip would have no problem with moving or passing through 4K data.

The issue that would be hit IMHO, would be when attempting to :
+) Persist RAM locally on the devices non volatile memory (not sure that's up to the bandwidth job)
+) Even sending 24fps 4K uncompressed raw over wifi (even at 300Mbps - 450Mbs) would be tricky.

If 1GB of memory was used a buffer (while writing over wifi), you might be able to get up to 30sec clips?

Due to the 'monsterous' file size involved, I don't believe Apple will 'help' create something with unwieldily sized (movie) files.

Single DNG images is a compromise that still allows Apple to 'polish up' and expose less compressed images (my Guess is that they will be doing something like ADD behind the scenes).

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Sidenote : With dual lenses able to collate different vantage points (albeit at different zooms), I wonder if Dual recording will one day result in new 3D image format; One that can more easily feed into visual recognition systems, and could leverage 3D object transformations (for stellar image compression).

Sidenote 2 : When millions of people see (probably for the first time), an image taken and displayed in Wide Colour Gamut, is it going to create an anomaly when those pictures - when seen on computer monitors, and TV screens. Could THIS will catalyze consumers interests in display devices that 'look right'?, with real saturated Reds and Greens? Could new WGC mobile phones provide an impetus on the uptake of UHD?

AJ

 

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Sidenote 2 : When millions of people see (probably for the first time), an image taken and displayed in Wide Colour Gamut, is it going to create an anomaly when those pictures - when seen on computer monitors, and TV screens. Could THIS will catalyze consumers interests in display devices that 'look right'?, with real saturated Reds and Greens? Could new WGC mobile phones provide an impetus on the uptake of UHD?

AJ

People will readily change their mobile phones but not their TVs.