It's tough to predict the future, especially with cutbacks to R&D budgets in the face of a global economic slowdown. Still, it's always nice to see a forward-looking corporate-slide related to mobile handsets from the taller, blonder half of that Sony Ericsson partnership.
LTE and
fast CPUs are certainly no surprise, nor is that 1,024 x 768 XGA screen resolution that Japan's superphones are
already bumping up against. The most compelling vision is that of the embedded camera sensors: 12-20 megapixels capable of recording Full HD video by 2012. Adding more fuel to firey speculation that handsets are about to
find themselves embroiled in a megapixel war. Fine by us, just as long the optics and image processing are there to support such a resolution. Even though 12-20 megapixels seems high compared to the 5-8 megapixel cell phones we see today, those numbers are entirely within reason when you recall that Samsung hit
10 megapixels in Korea two years ago. In fact, we wouldn't be suprised in the least to find Ericsson's mythical device on the market well prior to 2012. Combined, these features certainly make for a tantalizing glimpse at the wireless handset future.
posted Nov 7th 2008 5:30AM
12-20 megapixels...
It is not just optics that needs to be better the size of the sensor would need to be increased, else you'd seriously drown in noise. Also you'd need some interesting storage system for all that data, even assuming you had hardware compression for the video.
Packing all that technology into a mobile sized device might prove to be the downfall of all of this :-)
A lot of HD camcorders are just using SD cards for the storage. With a 16Gb SDHC costing around $50 at the moment, well, the reasons are fairly obvious. Gb/$ ratios are doubling every four to six months with no apparent let-up.
16Gb should easily store two hours of Blu-ray/HD DVD quality video coupled with a decent soundtrack. The issue is not storage right now, it's the other issue you mention - the optics and quality of the cameras in general.
Unless you have some revolutionary optics technology, it will look horrible.
Even with the absolute best lenses on the market, cameras are limited by the lenses more and more, not the sensor.
Physics cannot be overcome by a spiffy PowerPoint presentation - get to the lab and come out when you have made it work!
squiggleslash, actually I wasn't very clear on that, I was more thinking of data rate than capacity, 20 mega pixels at say 30FPS, even if your only doing 8 bit bayer type sensor, that is about 4.8 Gbits/s off the sensor into RAM prior to compressing... AVCHD (max of about 25Mbits/s) being what it is is fine for use on SDHC cards but for larger formats you'd need either some pretty remarkable compression to be invented, or to use the oversized heat sink as your RF antenna :-)
Optically, they could do something along the lines of a micro lens array/light field capture and do some computational photography (on camera) - thus doing away with a focusing system - I guess that will be in the next marketing powerpoint...
Oh ok, I thought you were talking about the user storage system, not the bus-to-RAM part. That said, presumably regular HD camcorders have the same issue and have solved it too, is there any reason why their approach wouldn't work here too?
You may be right, but your numbers are off by a factor of 10. 1080p is 1920x1080, making for just over 2 megapixels. Just because it's max resolution of still images is 20 megapixels doesn't means it shoots video at the resolution. My 6 megapixel Canon elph captures video at just 640x400 resolution. Probably for the very reason you mention.