![]() He admitted that his company's latest reference design has some weaknesses that may make OEMs cautious: namely, a low resolution, low quality lenses and out-of-date pixels. Predictably, Pickett wouldn't answer this question or name any device manufacturer he's working with. In fact, the real question is why Nokia used its investment arm - Nokia Growth Partners (NGP)- to claim a stake, rather than just snapping up the entire company as it recently did with Scalado, another imaging-related startup. Pelican has already confirmed that its system could work in tandem with PureView designs, yielding some "pretty exciting possibilities." Having manufactured the PureView 808 with a ground-breaking 41MP camera sensor, and the Lumia 920 with sophisticated "floating lens" stabilization, the Finnish manufacturer is banking on camera hardware to help sell its coming generations of phones. ![]() Pelican's software is designed to exploit every part of a cutting-edge Snapdragon 800 mobile chip, from the CPU to the GPU and even the DSP, and indeed Qualcomm is already flaunting a reference tablet (shown at the top of this article) that has a functioning Pelican camera built into it.īy now, it should also be clear why Nokia wanted to secure itself a stake in the Pelican Imaging adventure. That fact alone is enough to explain why Qualcomm is a keen backer: above all, a chip maker of that size depends on consumers seeing a genuine reason to upgrade to smartphones or tablets containing the latest and most expensive processors. Now, this is where the business angle comes into play, because all these photographic capabilities have one thing in common: they require vast amounts of computing power. This reduces "color cross-talk" interference and hence, Pickett claims, delivers better image quality in low light than any existing smartphone camera. ![]() But this approach also has a major benefit for manufacturers: the absence of a focus system means that Pelican's camera has no moving parts, making it "half as thick as state-of-the-art competitors", according to Pickett, as well as bringing it into the normal realm of costs, estimated at between $18 and $20 per module.Ī second advantage to having 16 eyes, rather than one, is that you can build a highly accurate depth map of a scene, allowing the user to edit different people or objects separately without damaging their surroundings- or what Pickett describes as "Photoshop-level editing, non-destructively, with your finger on a cellphone or tablet." When shooting 1080p video, the camera could even correct for camera wobble separately at each plane of movement, offering powerful digital stabilization.įinally, each sub-camera captures just one color - red, green, or blue - instead of trying to cope with all three. Replacing the traditional need for focusing could make photography much easier and offer a level of creative freedom that was previously limited to much larger contraptions, such as the Lytro camera (another plenoptic product). ![]()
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