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OPPO just brought better optical zoom to mobile phones

By Marcus Wong - on 28 Feb 2017, 12:07am

OPPO just brought better optical zoom to mobile phones

According to Oppo, there’s no point in working on just numbers when they don’t produce real benefit for the users. Thus, they’ve focused on our “fundamental needs” – to take clear and beautiful pictures.

At a press conference held in MWC 2017, Dr King (Technical director, OPPO) talked about getting closer to the subject to place more emphasis on the eyes – the window to the soul. According to him,  digital zoom is the main thing keeping smartphone photography back, as the use of digital zoom creates blur and defects in the captured images.

However, having a functional optical zoom requires the use of additional lenses which in turn means a necessary gain in bulk if approached in the conventional sense. OPPO's approach borrows from the idea of periscopes and applies it to a dual lens design which allows it better results thanks to the following factors:

  • Maximum zoom capability - Periscope-style dual camera technology to work around space constraints. Shifted the angle by 90 degrees so that the lens has the space it needs to obtain the longer focal length while not needing to protrude out too far.
  • Smallest possible look- This design also allows them to use smaller lenses so that the entire configuration is only 5.7mm thick, some 10% less than that of a typical two lens design.
  • 3X optical zoom + Digital Fusion technology  - 5x lossless zoom is achieved by applying digital processing to the images captured by the 3x optical zoom lens and the second optical lens.
  • Best image stabilization- OIS technology applied directly to the optical prism in the telephoto lens which has been optimized to gather light. 

These next two videos probably illustrate the technology best:

OPPO says this approach took 106 of their engineers 8 revisions and more than 380 days to develop, but they are now confident enough in the design to plan for implementation in new devices as soon as later this year.

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