An all new light-field camera technology to be used in smartphones starting this year

Camera quality stands as one of the most important factors that can make or break a consumer’s smartphone buying decision these days. We’ve seen smartphone brands come up with exciting new techniques and features to make smartphone cameras faster and better every passing year.

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Generally, the camera sensor size and its quality is attributed most towards the image quality. The larger, the better they say. I am not downplaying the importance of lens, autofocus system or the image post-processing. Nokia gives a lot of importance to camera quality in its smartphones. We’ve seen Nokia N8, Nokia 808 PureView and the Nokia Lumia 1020 grabbing the best-smartphone camera awards and that is because the use of larger sensors and custom made lenses. But all of them had huge humps on their backs and can’t be considered as very stylish.

Last year, Sony came up with a large 1/2.3 inch camera sensor in the Xperia Z1. The Exmor RS camera sensor with Sony G lens was big enough for good image quality (at least when smartphone cameras are concerned) and small enough to be able to fit inside a 8.5 mm slim casing. But as they tried to cram a lot of pixels (20.1 MP) in a small sized sensor, it suffered with image noise.

Samsung has come up with a 1/2.6 inch ISOCELL camera sensor in the Galaxy S5 which improves to keep the image noise down to acceptable levels. It also brought a first-ever ‘Phase Detection Autofocus System’ in a smartphone for faster autofocus. LG came up with additional IR sensors to assist the already existing phase detection AF system in the LG G3. This results in faster than ever (and accurate) autofocus system in a smartphone.