Essential outlines the PH-1’s dual cameras

Essential released a blog post that outlines the technology and work that went into creating the dual camera for the unreleased Essential PH-1. Yazhu Ling is Essential’s imaging engineer, who tells us that the company wanted to build a camera that fulfilled two requirements: there should be no camera hump, and low-light quality shouldn’t be sacrificed as a result of that.

There are two cameras in the Essential Phone, one RGB and the other monochrome. The main RGB image is overlaid with the monochrome image, which when combined, results in a better-exposed image with reduced noise. By comparing nearby pixels between the two cameras, the ISP (Image signal processing) sort of ‘fills in the blanks” where there would otherwise be noise and lack of details.

Color only, Mono only, Fused image. Source: Essential

We’ve certainly seen the combination of an RGB and monochrome sensor in Huawei’s dual camera phones, as well as Honor’s later handsets. The newest device with this kind of camera tech is the Moto Z2 Force.

Ling says she’s been working on the Essential Phone’s camera since October of last year and the company has been tuning the sensors since January. The cameras have gone through 15 major tunings and the team has captured and looked through 20,000 photos and videos. Ling says she won’t stop perfecting the camera until the very last possible minute.

Click to Source link below to check out Essential’s progress with the cameras as well as some side-by-side comparisons to see how the imaging improved over the time leading up to the phone's announcement.

Source | Via