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Dual Camera Smartphones Expected to Inspire New 'Killer Apps'

Oh god - here we go. LinX solutions never sold well - and companies like Pelican are light years away when it comes to array sensors. Lets hope they do not muck up the SONY sensor that has been working great till now.
 
I can't get excited about dual-lens smartphones.

I have an 11 year-old point and shoot Canon that easily outperforms my iPhone. If the iPhone finally starts to approach that quality, then so what? If I want to take good photos, I carry my camera. If I wanted to take really good photos, I'd carry a professional camera. Yeah, yeah, the best camera is the one on you yabba-dabba-doo. Funny how all great photos are still taken on SLRs.

Only a 15 hour+ battery life under intensive conditions will truly take the iPhone into exciting areas.
 
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Mr. Retrofire said:
The first mobile phone with a 3D camera was available in 2007! It is almost 2017! :eek:

000000FA00525945-photo-samsung-sch-b710.jpg


Of course Samsung stole the idea from Apple in 2007! /s​
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This was for taking 3D pictures, two totally different reasons to have 2 lenses.
 
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Dual Lens can understand what you are photographing and render it out as a 3D space. It will lead to some stunning new experiences, photo, VR, and game wise. Never mind the photo improvements. Don't write it off so quickly.
 
keysofanxiety said:
Well if you told analysts back in 2007 that in less than a decade we'd have phones with desktop-class CPUs and console-level GPUs, I imagine they'd be saying a pretty similar thing. Sadly we've got an App Store predominantly full of addictive freemium pay-to-play rubbish games.

Hardware innovation only goes so far towards inspiring great things.
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Apple killed the possibility of great things by allowing crap onto the app store, and then showcasing it.
 
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Benjamin Frost said:
I can't get excited about dual-lens smartphones.

I have an 11 year-old point and shoot Canon that easily outperforms my iPhone. If the iPhone finally starts to approach that quality, then so what? If I want to take good photos, I carry my camera. If I wanted to take really good photos, I'd carry a professional camera. Yeah, yeah, the best camera is the one on you yabba-dabba-doo. Funny how all great photos are still taken on SLRs.

Only a 15 hour+ battery life under intensive conditions will truly take the iPhone into exciting areas.
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Which Canon camera is that? I have an older point and shoot Canon (SD110) as well, but don't use it as much since I most always have my iPhone with me. It's also nice to be able to do minor edits on phone and easily share it with friends, family and social media.
 
ya... killer apps like a "virtual lens app" for iOS, so u don't even need the MS googles.

That 16-camera lens is seriously messed up,, would make my eyes like that fish out of The Simpsons Movie....

Now, how do i make phone calls on it..
 
ArtOfWarfare said:
Apple killed the possibility of great things by allowing crap onto the app store, and then showcasing it.
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Completely agree. iAds was a great way of encouraging developers to the App Store. However, anybody with half a brain cell could have predicted that it would only encourage the wrong type of developers.
 
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Huawei are an "industry leader", just because they make lots of phones? Is that a joke? :D

Their name is appropriately pronounced "Who-are-we?" - very apt, since they're hardly a household name.
 
bondsbw said:
I'd think having cameras on opposite ends of the phone would provide more realistic 3D photo/video capabilities than two cameras that are next to each other, as in the phone shown here.

If they decide to have adjacent cameras, it seems odd that they would house them separately. A rounded rectangle could hold two or more and allow other sensors to exist between the lenses without compromising the design.
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The cameras are not primarily for 3D, they're for zoom. They need to be closer together for zoom.
 
The problem with the phone market at this point is that there isn't much more technology that can be added to a phone that hasn't already been added and that will be apparent to the user. Adding a second camera is an obvious upgrade to end-users. They just may not understand why it's "better" or what they can do with it.


My wife used to try like crazy to find me the right point-and-click camera. I ended up with a few good ones that just didn't last. One reason is because I never carried it with me unless we were planning to shoot photos and usually we'd have our DSLR with us anyway. Switching to smartphones with decent cameras allows me to capture a lot of moments I would have missed relying on a point-and-click. For example: A recent car accident I was in and was able to photograph because I had my phone with me. I never got around to keeping a camera in my car for incidents like that, but since moving to a smartphone, I don't have to.

3D touch needs some work. It conflicts with features in iOS that were made for iPhones that don't have 3D Touch.

The upgraded Touch ID makes the features of the lock screen pretty useless because of how good it is at identifying you and getting you into the phone.

I'd actually be surprised if 2016 is the year that the dual-lens iPhone releases. Just not too surprised. I expect another decent showing with mostly expected updates. I'm more curious if Apple plans to change up the external design this year or if they'll stick with the iPhone 6 design for another couple cycles.
 
e93to said:
Didn't an HTC phone (or Sony?) have dual cameras at one point? I thought it was a nice gimmick, and the 3D effects were nice (one of my friends had the phone). I'm surprised industry didn't immediately follow suit. But then again, the uses for dual camera seemed very limited and, well, gimmick. I guess it's up to the developers to came up with apps that actually give meaningful purpose to dual camera
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It was indeed the HTC One (M8) that had dual cameras, yes.
 
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Why dual cameras make sense? Think about your eyes first. But before that think about "parallax." What the heck is parallax you may ask. Here is a short definition: "It's the difference in the apparent change of position of an object." Let's do a test. Cover one eye and align your index finger with, let's say, a power pole down the street, keep the index in the same position, do not move it, now cover the other eye, of course, uncover the first eye. What happened? The power pole moved? Nope! And this is Parallax. Our brain uses this to calculated depth, and here is where the dual-lens cameras show the advantage. They use the same concept to take better pictures.
 
I'd love to see one of these cameras have a depth grid sensor where you get the distance, for each pixel in the image, of the solid object imaged. Tie that into the motion controller and you can do a freestyle 3D scan of an object or room.
 
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