Phonearena posted new pics of the Honami smartphone that features a 1/2.3 inch sensor with Sony 28mm G lens. It will be announced on September 4th and this may be the day they will announce the “lens-camera” too.
The i1 smartphone also features a new JPEG engine. This one could be used by future Sony E-A mount cameras too!
16 Responses
No xenon flash?
Andrea, what is “a 1/2.3 inch sensor”?
A sensor???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_format
it means same sensor as entry level compact cameras
Is there a xenon flash?
Looks just like the Xperia Z. Hopefully Sony doesn’t mess up the UX design of the phone/camera. NEX menu system is a horrible example.
The sensor may be larger, but the effective lens diameter (= light opening) does not seem larger than a normal phone camera. Consequently, it will collect the same total amount of light as a normal phone camera.
If two equally efficient sensors of different size collect the same amount of light, they will have the same noise in the full image.
So what is all the fuzz about?
you got most of your facts wrong. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. so I won’t.
+1
Most people tend to say this as a first knee-jerk. They can’t grasp the concept of equivalence. But it is really easy to explain:
Imagine that you take a photo with a 50 mm lens at f/2.0 and ISO 800 on camera A.
Now you want to take the same photo with camera B which has a 4x larger sensor area (2x wider and 2x higher).
It is well known that a camera with a 4x larger sensor area and an equally efficient sensor will produce the same noise in the full photo at a 4x higher ISO. (It is really a matter of exposure, not ISO, but you will probably find it easier to accept the ISO approach.)
A 4x higher ISO is 2 stops. So at the same shutter speed, you will need a 2 stops smaller aperture. So on camera B we will need to take the photo at f/4.0.
We also want the same angle of view in the two photos, so we use a 100 mm lens on camera B.
Now we calculate the effective lens diameter (or virtual aperture diameter or whatever one prefers to call it) which is focal length divided by f-number (should be obvious since the f-number is focal length divided with effective lens diameter).
Camera A: 50 mm / 2.0 = 25 mm.
Camera B: 100 mm / 4.0 = 25 mm.
See. They are the same. So moving the same small lens diameter to a larger sensor doesn’t really give you a noise advantage. You need a larger lens diameter too to take advantage of the larger sensor.
And this phone obviously does not have a larger lens diameter.
I might add that the larger sensor still has one advantage even though its lens diameter is unchanged:
It can be exposed with a larger total amount of light (since the max. amount of light on a sensor also usually scales with the area) without clipping the highlights.
So in my example above, you could use a 4x slower shutter speed on camera B instead of increasing the ISO 4x, and you would have the same risk of clipping highlights as camera A. This would result in a photo with less noise, but of course also with higher risk of motion blur due to the slower shutter speed.
With your logic all we would need is fast glass. I wish that were the case.
It’s a flat black thing.
Yeeeaaahhhh…
That’s weird maaaan…
so… no xenon flash? Miss the good old days of the Sony Ericsson K850..