Dual cameras are all the rage in high-end smartphones these days, but you don’t see them all that often in mid-range devices (with a few noteworthy exceptions). Samsung wants to change that.
The company has unveiled a new dual camera solution that it says will bring features like bokeh-style depth refocusing and low-light shooting to “lower price mobile devices.”
The new system isn’t just hardware, it’s also software. Each image sensor captures different information, but it’s Samsung’s software algorithms that make it possible to stitch together a finished picture without relying on high-end hardware.
Samsung says its solution could bring dual cameras to entry-level and mid-range phones.
There’s a catch though: it sounds like you either get bokeh affects or low-light shooting, but not both.
Samsung will offer a 13MP + 5MP image sensor set that’s coupled with its refocusing algorithm for portrait mode-style depth effects. There’s also an 8MP + 8MP module that comes with the low light algorithm.
So, I am confused here. Chinese companies already offer smartphones with dual cameras. In Kimovil prices start at 49 dollars with the Ulefone-S7 that does offer bokeh. We can start talking about quality and agree that it will be probably like night and day, but it seems that it is not so much difficult to add a second camera and offer this functionality. Even in a $50 smartphone.