With their tiny lenses and even tinier sensors, will cellphone cameras ever be able to take photos as good as those from SLRs and Micro Four Thirds cameras? The quality has all but been taken care of with the latest phone-cams, but there's one problem common to all point-and-shoots: Their tremendous depth-of-field. A patent from Samsung shows how this could be fixed.
Depth-of-field is the amount of front-to-back sharpness in a photograph. Lots of it means that almost everything, near and far, will be in focus. A shallow depth-of-field (DOF) means almost nothing will be sharp other than what you actually focus on. Large sensors and wide-open apertures give shallow DOF, and let you pop your subject out from a blurred background.
Before and after: Blurred backgrounds from tiny cellphone-camera sensors
Samsung's fix for small sensors actually uses two cameras in one, almost like a stereoscopic camera. The main one takes the shot as usual whilst a lower resolution camera takes another shot. The offset between them lets the camera work out the depth of anything in the frame. This information is then processed and digital blur applied to wash out the background.
It's an idea that is already used, more or less, by the iPhone app Synthcam. The app combines stills from a video stream to calculate depth. Samsung's version doesn't rely on you shooting a shaky video, though, so it would be more or less invisible to the user.
Like most patents, we have no idea whether this will ever make it to market. But at least it shows that somebody is looking at the last big reason not to use a cameraphone for all your snapshooting.
Samsung Working on DSLR-like Bokeh for Compact Cameras [Photography Bay]
Samsung Patent Application (PDF) [USPTO]
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