According to Sony, the photo quality of smartphones could exceed that of SLRs within two years, thanks to increasingly large sensors and even brighter lenses.
If the design of smartphones seems to have stagnated for a few years, there is however one area in which manufacturers are concentrating all their efforts: the quality of the photos.
To do this, they now offer increasingly large sensors, partnerships with renowned brands in the world of photography or real optical zooms on the most recent models. What let some manufacturers hope for a rapprochement between the photo quality of smartphones and that of SLR cameras in the coming years. This is particularly the case of Terushi Shimizu, head of Sony’s semiconductor division. As reported by the Japanese agency Nikkei, the head of Sony wants to say the least optimistic about the photo quality of smartphones in the years to come. “We expect photos to surpass the image quality of DSLR cameras in the next few years”he announced during a briefing on Friday.
It must be said that Sony is no stranger to the photo quality of smartphones. Of course, we first think of Sony Xperia smartphones, designed by the manufacturer, some of which offer large sensors, like the Xperia Pro-I, or real optical zooms, like the Xperia 1 IV. But Sony is also a producer of photo sensors for all the other manufacturers. Along with Samsung, these are the two main suppliers of high-end photo sensors for all smartphones on sale. Suffice to say that Sony is involved in the continuous improvement of the quality of images captured by smartphones.
Better quality thanks to larger sensors
To explain this increase in quality to come in the field of smartphone photos, Terushi Shimizu relies on the increasingly wide apertures of the lenses and on increasingly efficient sensors in the management of digital noise. This better management is largely based on the integration of increasingly large photo sensors within smartphones themselves. For a little over a year, we have been witnessing the arrival on the market of smartphones equipped with 1-inch type sensors, whether on the Xperia Pro-I from Sony, but also on smartphones from Sharp and Leica in Japan. Most of the main smartphone manufacturers have also equipped themselves with sensors that are increasingly approaching the one-inch format.
“Around 2019, it was said that three elements, the battery, the display and the camera would evolve in smartphones. While the other two have technically reached a ceiling, we can still expect improvements in the field of photography », says Terushi Shimizu. In the coming months, we expect at least two smartphones to hit the market with a definite boost in photo quality: the OnePlus 10 Ultra — in partnership with Hasselblad — and the Xiaomi 12 Ultra — in partnership with Leica . Faced with Sony, Samsung is also communicating more and more about its own photo sensor, the Isocell HP1, capable of capturing 200 megapixel shots.
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