Apple’s favorite camera sensor maker may have just dropped a big hint that a dual-lens camera is coming to the iPhone 7 later this year.
Sony CFO Kenichiro Yoshida revealed yesterday during the company’s Q3 FY15 earnings call that its dual-lens camera platform will be featured in a range of products from “major smartphone players” over the next year.
Could he possibly be talking about the iPhone?
Rumors have heated up recently claiming Apple will add a dual-lens camera system to the iPhone 7. Apple is expected to use dual-lens technology from LinX, an Israeli camera company it acquired last year.
It’s possible that the new dual-lens camera system will still use Sony sensors and utilize Linx’s brilliant software to create zooming, better depth of field, and improved low-light pictures over a single camera sensors.
“Our so-called dual lens – dual camera platform will be launched by, we believe, from major smartphone players,” Yoshida told investors during the earnings call. “However, as I said previously, recently, our smartphone market is growing and particularly, our high-end smartphone market is now slowing down. So, that may impact the demand or production schedule of dual camera smartphones by the major smartphone manufacturers. So, we believe the real start, the takeoff of smartphone with dual lens camera will be in the year of 2017.”
Other tech companies like HTC and Lenovo have already debuted dual-lens cameras on smartphones. Apple has reportedly requested dual-lens samples from a number of manufacturers in China and Taiwan, but the new dual-lens camera might only be available on the iPhone 7 Plus this year before it’s ready to go mainstream in 2017 like Yoshida predicts.
