The cameras on our phones worked so well these days it's easy to take for granted
all the technology making that possible. It wasn't long ago that phone cameras
were really primitive and not terribly useful. The first camera phones were
released almost twenty years ago. They had enough memory to store about 20
photos and a maximum resolution that's a fraction of a megapixel. When the first
iPhone was released in 2007, it was equipped with just a 2 megapixel camera. No flash,
autofocus or video recording and it wasn't until 2010 that it received the front-facing camera.
I grew up dreaming about this. You know dreaming about video calling and it's real now.
By 2013, "selfie" had become the oxford dictionaries word of the year.
Since then, phone cameras have continued to improve and companies are doubling down on camera
technology and hopes that better cameras will equal better sales.
We design the world's best camera introducing the beautiful, new Pixel 3.
The all-new Galaxy Note 9.
You are going to be blown away with the pictures you can take with the iPhone 10S' camera.
But because everyone wants their phone to be as slim as possible, there's only so much
physical space available to device manufacturers when developing new camera tech.
Traditionally, when you take a photo with a camera, you cause a physical
shutter to open and close exposing the camera center to whatever you're taking
a picture of. The sensor takes all that data from the burst of light and process
it into a photo. In general, the bigger the sensor, the more data the camera
collects and the better the photo. Cameras like those from Sony, Canon or
Nikon, are able to produce impressive images because large centers and complex
lens systems allow in as much light as possible.It used to be that the camera
in your pocket was just a dumbed down version of the larger one strapped
around your neck but we're at an intersection where the camera is
becoming much more. While digital cameras and DSLRs will always excel in a
hardware capacity, smart phones are quickly bridging that gap with its own
set of strengths. Traditionally, cameras have been pieces of hardware. For decades
at least and that's that's not true when it comes to smartphones. You really have
to treat it like a piece of software cause that's what is it.
Features, like smart HDR and adjustable depth of field, featured in the new
iPhone, night sight and super zoom in the Pixel 3 are paving the way for a new
camera platform augmented by complex software and processing capability.
There may be advantages to being able to have a large lens but there's also advantages
to being able to have a smaller device that has good computational capabilities.
A lot of the smartphones these days have almost as much power, if not more, than
some laptops. They definitely have a lot more power than, than traditional cameras.
In terms of the amount of processing and software that you can run. So, the camera
systems on a lot of these things may depending if it has you know dual camera
on the front or the back. I mean you're having multiple lenses, multiple chip,
connectors, sometime, I mean depending on how its laid out, there might even be a, you know, a secondary little mini motherboard on there. Apple does a really good job
with keeping it you know pretty tight and everything just connects to the
logic board right at the top of the phone. Apple's new iPhone XR and XS
included a huge upgrade to its computing power with the A12 Bionic chip. It's a
machine-learning processor with Apple's neural engine. The A12 Bionic takes
the input off the camera sensor and instead puts those through computational
models, which enables features like smart HDR and the dynamic bouquet effects of portrait mode
The complexity, like the cameras aren't just cameras anymore.
They're facial recognition scanners. So there's a whole lot more tech packed
into the top of your phone and you can see that reflected in the notches that
people always have a hard time with on Samsung phones because there's a lot more tech up there.
That's the evolution that I've seen. And then there's the Google Pixel 3, which
many regards the best camera on a phone. The Pixel team advanced the camera
software with machine learning. They took over a million images to develop the AI
necessary for portrait mode and over a 100 million images of faces for Top Shot, a feature that suggests the best picture out of a series of photos.
Our photographers will take these. Walk around San Francisco. Stop people on the
street and say "Hey, can I take your photo with this funny-looking, this funny-looking camera rig?"
and from that you can generate the data that you need to take take great portraits of people.
Algorithm is dedicated to low-light, algorithms dedicated to scenes with really bright brights and really dark darks, high-contrast scenes and then we
also have algorithms that are meant to help you with the zoom that produce these incredible incredible detailed
images from a single camera that normally you'd have to have a second zoomed in camera to take.
One of the most common techniques in which software enables better photos is multi frame stacking, which is
blending together multiple images taking a succession when
a photo is captured. Using information from all these frames, they can reduce
noise, camera shake and improve image quality. This is something that smart
phone engineers have invested in considerably more than traditional digitalcamera manufacturers. A common trend we're seeing more and more is
phones equipped with multiple lenses. A lot of these use a dual lens
configuration for portrait mode but they help make the camera more versatile by
adding telephoto or wide-angle lenses. Samsung just recently announced the
first quad camera smartphone, with the new Galaxy A9, bringing all these
shooting modes to one device. The photos we take with our phones have gotten so
good they've even become a tool for professional photographers. We're excited
to announce a new partnership with one of the most celebrated photographers of
our time, Annie Leibovitz. She's using Pixel 3 to take photos as she
travels around the country capturing portraits of inspiring people and places.
As an artist and as a professional, I think it's important that you are able
to back out and ask yourself like which of these tools helps me express myself
most truly as an artist. Austin Mann is a travel photographer whose work has
appeared as part of the shot on iPhone campaign. In some respects, you can't do
everything that the big hardware can but then in other respects because of the
unique power of software you know you're unlocking new powers to do things that
you can't do it's the big hardware. If there's a really pretty sunset and the
sky is pink and really pretty and you've got the cool foreground and you shoot
that on your traditional DSLR and you shoot it with an iPhone the one that is
by far like better and ready to share and more beautiful is the iPhone. We are
not even close to the limit what we can do with software. There's a lot more image quality we can get, a lot more low-light, a lot more dynamic
range and you'll see a lot more image quality improvements in the future.
We're trying to make you a better photographer so you can feel great about every photo you take.