Qualcomm's 6 Megapixel Camera Chips

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=4&u=/nm/20040513/tc_nm/telecoms_qualcomm_dc' target='_blank'>http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...oms_qualcomm_dc</a><br /><br /></div>"Mobile phone technology provider Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq:QCOM - news) on Wednesday unveiled a new line of chips with ultra-high resolution camera features and said it was making inroads in advanced new markets. In a volley of announcements coinciding with the company's spring Wall Street analyst briefing here, Qualcomm introduced the first of its "7000" series, all-in-one chips that offer up to 6-megapixel cameras and full-motion camcorder recording. Six-million pixel image quality would make cameraphones based on Qualcomm chips competitive with the most advanced digital cameras being sold in consumer markets worldwide."<br /><br />6 MP on a phone? 8O Higher resolution is one thing, but what about the image quality? I've yet to see a photo from a camera or Pocket PC Phone edition that looks decent, regardless of resolution. They all look like they're stuck in the world of 1997 digital cameras, which is not a good thing. Another thing to consider is the storage requirements of a 6 MP JPEG image - you'd need quite a big of memory for it to be practical, and forget about sending that over MMS. Ultimately I think this is moving in the wrong direction - if people could get a high-quality 2 MP image that would make a decent 4x6 print, I think they'd be perfectly content. For those of you that use camera phones, what do you think about this?

[bgracewood]

I totally agree. If I want a high quality image, I use my Sony V1. With that camera I have full control over all the photographic settings (ISO, shutter, aperture), and also it can be held steady or attached to a tripod.

When I'm carying my phone around, I might take a photo of something amusing or interesting that I otherwise would not have bothered with. The point here is that I'm interested in capturing the essence of the image (e.g. words on a sign, the colour of a sunset, or the badge on a ferrari), not necessarily all the nuances.

I reckon if they could improve the quality and exposure of existing CMOS sensors, that would be plenty enough for me. The current sensors do very poorly in low light, and have trouble capturing the depth of light and colour in most landscape images. If that requires more megapixels, then cool, but surely 6MP is overkill?

Also re MMS, I imagine they'd have to do something like the 'email mode' on my camera, whereby a full-size image is saved along with a 640x480 highly compressed jpeg. The phone software would probably be intelligent enough to only send the smaller image.

[ricksfiona]

With the memory requirements, I wouldn't worry too much about that anymore. You can get a 512MB SD card for almost $100. A card like that will carry quite a bit.

That would be so cool to have a 6MP camera device on my iPAQ 5550!

[apeguero]

I agree with you also Jason. I can't see how having 6mp over 1mp, or even 2mp, would benefit these phones especially when they use the little digital sensors as lenses. Also, the point about transferring 4-5mb files over the airwaves could be, not only slow, but also expensive.

I'd say if you want portability in a camera then carry a Canon S400 along with your phone, that is, off-course, when you don't want to lug around your EOS 10D :mrgreen: 0X

[Ryan Joseph]

While I agree that this wouldn't work in most of today's phones, it's very cool to see innovation like this. Someday, we'll all carry around one device that does everything, from phone to camera to PDA...and it will do all functions equally well.

So, this is just a little bit ahead of its time. 8)

[ND Bob]

:soapbox: The issue for camera phones is the same as in all small, inexpensive cameras: the lens is tiny and (usually) of poor quality. Simply speaking, camera lenses work just like the magnifying glass you used to burn your name into tennis balls when you were a kid - they gather all the light that hits their surface and concentrate it. The bigger the glass, the more light it can gather from the same scene. (Think about how wide the lenses sports photographers use are, and you'll get the idea.)

Camera phone lenses aren't able to gather enough light to be very useful outside of bright sunlight, and forget about telephoto with a lens that size, even if it were available! (Not enough light hitting the glass to take a good exposure of your kid on the stage.)

Camera phones are wonderful for snapshots - they let you capture moments you missed before because you weren't carrying your clunky old camera. What they lack in quality they make up for in spontaneity.

Putting a 6MP chip in such a device is silly, though. The only reason for it is because most consumers have no idea how much lens quality and size affect their pictures. Just as computer manufacturers latched onto MHz as a (misleading) shorthand for speed, camera manufacturers have used MP as a (misleading) measure of image quality. You'll get a much better 8x10 from your 2MP Nikon digital camera than from a 6MP camera phone, although most consumers would never expect it.

[cludwig]

It's true that given a choice most consumers will opt for the "bigger number", but I would venture that probably the "only other good reason" for 6 MP sensor in a camera phone is that you'll be able to use digital zoom without as much quality degradation as you see today. A VGA sensor (300 k pixels) zoomed to 4x (effective output resolution now 160 x 120) just looks horrific, but if you downsample a 6 MP sensor to VGA most of the time, and then downsample some portion of the sensor for digital zoom (still "saving" VGA into the file, but now it's not from the whole sensor) you're at least going to have more useful quality at 4x... which is important because it's nearly impossible to squeeze optical zoom elements into the extremely limited space that manufacturers allocate for the camera part of the phone... executive summary: if you want any kind of zoom feature in a camera phone that doesn't have room for moving lenses, then you benefit from a higher resolution sensor, even if you don't (in most cases) save off the full resolution of the sensor.

...The only reason for it is because most consumers have no idea how much lens quality and size affect their pictures. Just as computer manufacturers latched onto MHz as a (misleading) shorthand for speed, camera manufacturers have used MP as a (misleading) measure of image quality. You'll get a much better 8x10 from your 2MP Nikon digital camera than from a 6MP camera phone, although most consumers would never expect it....

[ND Bob]

I would venture that probably the "only other good reason" for 6 MP sensor in a camera phone is that you'll be able to use digital zoom without as much quality degradation as you see today.

That's a good point - if you had a camera that saved only VGA resolution images, a 6 MP sensor would give you an effective 20x zoom with no loss of quality (i.e., no upwards interpolation), and without having to engineer a miniature zoom lens. Hadn't thought of using a huge sensor as a virtual optical zoom lens. :idea:

It depends how such a chip is marketed, then. If it's sold as a 6 MP camera, people are going to be very disappointed in the image quality. If it's pitched as essentially a portable webcam with a really long virtual zoom, I could go for that.

There'd need to be some term other than "digital zoom" to describe the process, though... snobs like me get all worked up over digital zooms that just up-interpolate the detail that's captured optically. This is entirely different - for wide-angle pictures, the interpolation would be downward, and for long telephoto ones there would be no interpolation at all... one pixel = one pixel. That's far preferable to the digital zooms provided on regular digicams, even if it's only practical in a minature device like this.

[ND Bob]

"Six-million pixel image quality would make cameraphones based on Qualcomm chips competitive with the most advanced digital cameras being sold in consumer markets worldwide."

It's statements like the one Jason's quoting here that worry me. Sure this chip could give your cellular "webcam" a monstro-zoom for VGA images, (which would be wonderful), but there's no way a camera phone will ever, ever, EVER be "competitive with the most advanced digital cameras being sold."

The author of that Reuters article obviously doesn't know the first thing about cameras to make as ridiculous a statement as that. :roll: "Image quality" and "image resolution" are NOT synonymous, despite the popular misconception.

No one expects a $7.95 single-use camera to take images of the same caliber as a $2000 SLR paired up with a $2500 lens, even though the medium they're using (35mm film, ISO 200) would have the exact same "resolution." The optics of the camera, its focusing and metering systems, its manual capabilities, and so on all have a tremendous amount of influence over the final image quality.

Digital is no different... a 6 MP image from a digital SLR will usually surpass the quality from the 6-8 MP consumer or even "prosumer" models, because of all the difference I just mentioned.

It's very unfortunate that even technology writers seem to drop the ball on this issue. I can't imagine how disappointed people would be with their 6 MP phonecams if the hype is that these little toys are capable of producing anything but casual images.

[ND Bob]

I reckon if they could improve the quality and exposure of existing CMOS sensors, that would be plenty enough for me. The current sensors do very poorly in low light, and have trouble capturing the depth of light and colour in most landscape images.

Maybe you're thinking just of consumer-level cameras, but quite a few D-SLRs are using CMOS sensors now. :D All of Canon's newer models use this technology, and the results are outstanding. There are many benefits, and I'd expect that CMOS will hold both the high and low ends of the market before too long.

Take a look at http://www.acdsystems.com/English/Community/ColumnsArticles/DigitalCamera/camera-2003-11-29.htm for a good summary of the two technologies.

[darrylb]

This actually makes sense if you think about it.....

I was listening to the regional head of a major mobile phone company talking about 3G the other day and he said that 3G is all about content. What he meant was that the 3G market will be driven by the market consumption of information be that information videos, photos, messages, documents or whatever. In this respect, a 6MP camera is perfect as a 3G content provider.

I wouldnt expect this to turn up in devices for at least another year. However, we must expect that these sorts of devices will come out. The short term (1-3 year) future is mostly just a bigger better today.

Think gigabyte storage in a phone, ubiquitous smart phones, hi res images, video conferencing on your mobile, zoom lenses, VOIP, multiple network handsets (3G, WiMax/WiFi) or whatever. This is where things are inevitably going.....

That is ... in my humble opnion.... :D

[ND Bob]

I wouldnt expect this to turn up in devices for at least another year. However, we must expect that these sorts of devices will come out. The short term (1-3 year) future is mostly just a bigger better today.

That's true for a lot of things - Moore's Law has been remarkably accurate in predicting developments in processor speeds, etc. And it's true that there will no doubt be remarkable advances in a lot of areas of technology that we don't even have any idea about now.

But the basic physics of a camera phone are the limiting factor here. Due to the size limitations of the form factor, such a device will never be much more than a glorified pinhole camera. Camphone lenses are by their very nature tiny, and no amount of technology can change their limited surface area. Surface area = light-gathering ability.

What that means is that you're not going to have any luck freezing water over a falls, or an athlete in mid-dunk - in order to gather enough light to properly expose the sensor, the shutter speed for a tiny lens will always be far too long to catch those moments. The only way technology MIGHT help here would be to vastly increase the sensitivity of the image sensors, but considering it takes a shutter speed of about 1/5000 sec. to freeze a waterfall, we're a very long way off from that in a camphone.

And no matter how sensitive the sensor, the physics of a tiny lens make it impossible to create that sharp-subject/blurred-background look that is popular in portraits. That effect (depth of field is it's technical name... it refers to how far the area of focus extends in front of and behind the subject) is an important aspect of photography that can't be duplicated by such a tiny lens. A lens that would fit in a camphone will have a virtually unlimited dept of field, meaning that everything from a few inches in front of the camera to the clouds on the horizon will be in perfect focus. That might be the effect you're looking for, or it might not. But it's an illustration of how the limitations of the form factor make it physically impossible for a miniature camera phone to have the same abilities as a larger camera, no matter how technologically advanced its guts are.

I don't mean to harp on this :? , but it's really important to understand that Moore's Law has no bearing on this aspect of image quality. No change in lens technology ten years from now will change the basic physics of lenses, and that means that camera phones can never have image quality and capabilities on par with their larger cousins.

[Jason Dunn]

Also re MMS, I imagine they'd have to do something like the 'email mode' on my camera, whereby a full-size image is saved along with a 640x480 highly compressed jpeg. The phone software would probably be intelligent enough to only send the smaller image.

True, but do you want to guess how long it would take the average phone's CPU to use bicubic filtering to resize a 6 MP down to a VGA-sized image? I'd estimate a good 30 to 60 seconds given the CPUs in more "feature phones" (not smartphones). That's a long time to wait, and it just seems impractical to me.

[Jason Dunn]

With the memory requirements, I wouldn't worry too much about that anymore. You can get a 512MB SD card for almost $100. A card like that will carry quite a bit.

Ah, but do you want to guess how many people add SD cards to their phones? I'd venture less than 0.1% of all phones out there that have the ability to use SD/MMC actually have one. Granted, you're right about that when it comes to PDAs.

That would be so cool to have a 6MP camera device on my iPAQ 5550!

Indeed. :-) I think it will be converged PDA/phone devices that could make the best use of something like this, but not unless the quality improves...

[Jason Dunn]

...the "only other good reason" for 6 MP sensor in a camera phone is that you'll be able to use digital zoom without as much quality degradation as you see today.

Great thought! That hadn't occured to me, but you're absolutely right - with a 6 MP image, you could do 3x digital zoom and actually have a decent quality image.

[rbrome]

First, here is the original press release:

http://www.qualcomm.com/press/releases/2004/040513_msm7xxx.html

Now, a few points need to be made:

- If you read the press release, the 7000 series is a whole new direction for Qualcomm. These are NOT aimed at cell phones! PDAs are more like the target here. The press release doesn't even mention phones, instead talking about "new device categories". Qualcomm is well aware of the convergence happening in the mobile device space, and this is Qualcomm's volley against Intel and Texas Instruments.
- ...which is underscored by the fact that these chips will include "an applications processor ... delivering up to 1GHz speeds". 8O
- Qualcomm chips historically include a laundry list of features, 2/3 of which are not implemented in any one device using that chip. So just because it can support 6MP cameras, doesn't mean much. Probably 1/10th of the devices ever made with this chip will fully utilize that feature.

[Sven Johannsen]

"For those of you that use camera phones, what do you think about this?

How about those of use that don't use camera phones because cameras aren't allowed where we work? There are a lot of us. Keep the cameras off the phones. If you have to have one, push for an SDIO slot and an included camera....that you could upgrade.

[Jonathon Watkins]

"For those of you that use camera phones, what do you think about this?

How about those of use that don't use camera phones because cameras aren't allowed where we work? There are a lot of us.

Darn right. :| You try getting a Bluetooth phone without a camera on it. Not easy! Cameras should NOT be a standard attachment on a phone. :?