Barcelona
Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo showcased the world’s first periscope-style dual-camera technology for smartphones on Monday at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona.
The new technology offers 5x optical zoom capability on a smartphone at the same clarity as the 2x zoom available on most cameras today.
Oppo is now the top smartphone brand in China with 16.8 per cent market share, and the world’s fourth best-selling smartphone brand, according to research firm International Data Corporation.
Sky Li, Oppo Vice-President and Managing Director of International Mobile Business, said that Oppo has worked for almost a year to develop the revolutionary periscope-styled dual-camera technology. Currently, more than 50 patents have been filed for this technology.
He said that the technology was inspired by the idea of a periscope on a submarine. The dual camera utilises wide-angle and telephoto lenses, and the housing for the telephoto lens uses an innovative periscope-style structure.
By shifting the angle of the telephoto lens by 90 degrees and using a periscope-style prism, he said the lens will have the space it needs to zoom further out.
He said the new dual-camera set-up also helps to keep a smartphone thin. Due to the periscope-style construction, the camera module is now only 5.7mm thick, which is 10 per cent thinner than a typical 2x optical zoom lens in a smartphone. The new lens also uses image stabilisation technology.
“Typically, when the zoom factor increases in capturing an image, even the slightest vibrations can have a dramatic effect on the clarity of the image. The other breakthrough of this “5x Dual Camera Zoom” is the Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) solution. Different from other manufacturers who use optical image stabilisation on the wide-angle lens, Oppo took a new approach and applied OIS directly to the telephoto lens,” he said.
Through the OIS technology, he said that both the prism and telephoto lens intelligently sense vibrations and compensate in real time. The all-new OIS solution can improve the performance of previous generations by 40 per cent, and the prism mechanism dynamically adjusts its angle at precise increments of 0.0025 degrees. This technology ensures that images are clear and stable even at full 5x zoom.
