New OmniVision RAW-capable camera sensor would vastly improve future iPhones

Cell phone cameras are unmitigated garbage. By nature, the CMOS chips have to be small, which means less surface area to suck in light. That’s fine in an emergency, or to snap a lip-pursed Snooki shot of some girls you met at the bar, but right now, you’ll simply never take a snap with a cameraphone that equals the picture quality of even that five-year old digicam lurking in your obsolete gadget drawer.

Worse: all too often, cameraphone makers try to compensate for the terrible image quality of their chips by cramming more megapixels into the chip, which fools buyers into thinking they are getting a better camera, but counter-intuitively just makes image quality even poorer. What’s needed is better chips, not more megapixels.

So it’s exciting to see OmniVision come out with a new, RAW-capable CMOS sensor for cellphones. Shooting in RAW means that no data is lost when your phone converts the image data from the CMOS into a JPEG, so it should improve image quality… especially given the OmniVision sensor maxes out at 5 megapixels.

The OmniVision chip is also apparently great in low-light conditions, another area in which traditional cameraphone chips fail. It can also shoot high-definition video at up to 1080p at 30 frames per second.

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We should start seeing OmniVision’s new chip in phones starting in July, which is probably too late to see it in the next iPhone… but imagine what you’ll be able to do with a RAW-capable iPhone 5G and a semi-sophisticated Adobe Lightroom or Aperture app.

[Image via Wired]

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