Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station suggests that future iPhones may get multispectral camera sensors. While this could, in theory, provide improved color accuracy and better low-light performance, we shouldn’t get overly excited.
The technology has already been seen in a smartphone, but the results weren’t particularly impressive and the technology is mostly used in military and industrial cameras …
Digital Chat Station only went as far as saying that Apple was expressing interest in the technology.
Apple is also interested in “multi-spectrum”, the supply chain is being evaluated, and the test has not yet begun.
What is a multispectral camera?
Conventional camera sensors have receptors for red, green and blue light. By measuring the relative amounts of light captured by each receptor, the camera can calculate a color value for each pixel. For example, equal signals from red and blue receptors would indicate the color purple. Extremely precise measurements mean that millions of color variants can be detected.
All of the light detected by a conventional sensor is in the visible light spectrum. A multispectral camera, in contrast, can also detect frequencies beyond the visible light range, namely infrared and ultraviolet.
What’s the benefit?
Multispectral cameras are primarily used for military and industrial applications, especially in satellites and drones.
The technology was initially developed for military target identification, and has since found other uses for weather satellites, crop monitoring, and even detecting forged paintings. Commercially, it is used for quality control within production lines.
In principle, the tech could also prove useful in consumer-grade cameras. It has the potential to improve the accuracy of color identification, most especially in low light conditions. Chinese smartphone brand Huawei has so far incorporated the tech into two of its smartphone cameras, citing color accuracy and improved performance in dark environments.
However, reviewers were not overly impressed, and so far there has been no indication that the tech is set to take off in smartphone cameras more generally.
9to5Mac’s Take
Digital Chat Station does have a decent track record, but not a perfect one. Apple takes an interest in a great many technologies that never make it into real life products. Given the vagueness of the report and the limited benefits for consumer cameras, I’m not expecting to see this in an iPhone anytime soon.
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
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