DXOMark: Disruptive technologies in mobile imaging: Taking smartphone cameras to the next level

We have all heard about new advances in smartphone technologies by now, including bokeh simulation, dual lens cameras,etc.

The smartphone industry in a race to stay relevant with annual upgrades are looking more and more at the camera end of the system as a way to distinguish their products in the marketplace.

DXO released a report detailing the improvements that have been made over the last 5 years with smartphones, mostly in the realm of computational photography.  The gap is wide as it should be between smartphones and even 1" sensors in terms of ability however, smartphones have certainly made the under 1" compact cameras difficult to sell.  The one advantage of compacts which is the zoom lens, is slowly being chipped away with multiple sensor cameras installed in smartphones.

It's not as if Canon is standing still in that area, having introduced the dual pixel RAW format with the 5D Mark IV and computational post processing of the image after capture.  We hope that Canon continues to augment this.

Their outlook;

Looking at the past 5 years of smartphone camera development, we can see that camera hardware and image processing are evolving alongside each other and at a much faster pace than in the “traditional” camera sector. DSLRs and mirrorless system cameras are still clearly ahead in some areas — for example, auto exposure, but in terms of image processing, Canon, Nikon, Pentax and the other players in the DSC market are behind what Apple, Samsung, Google, and Huawei can do. Thanks to their hardware advantages, the larger cameras don’t actually need the same level of pixel processing as smartphones to produce great images, but there is no denying that the performance gap between smartphones and DSLRs is narrowing.

Richard CanonNewsRichard CanonNews

Richard has been using Canon cameras since the 1990s, with his first being the now legendary EOS-3. Since then, Richard has continued to use Canon cameras and now focuses mostly on infrared photography. Richard is the founder and editor of CanonNews since 2017, and has worked as a writer on CanonRumors and other websites in the past.

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