Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-known analyst who pays attention to Apple’s industry chain, believes that Apple’s iPhone 14 will be replaced with a 48MP camera, while the iPhone 15 will have better optical zoom capabilities through a periscope lens.
The iPhone’s camera capability has always been the iPhone’s main marketing point. Although the company has been promoting improvements in computational photography and low-light shooting in recent years, the resolution of the image has always been fairly stable, which can be said to be the ancestral 12MP.
If Guo Mingchi’s statement is true, Apple will finally increase the number of lens pixels. According to a brokerage analysis report seen by AppleInsider, Guo Mingchi predicts that the iPhone 14 camera will be equipped with a 48MP sensor. He predicts that this change will help improve the financial situation of Largan Optoelectronics, a supplier of camera components.
This is not the first time Guo Mingchi has predicted the 48MP sensor. He said in a report in April that the sensor will come out in 2022. The large 1/1.3-inch sensor for the wide-angle lens may provide a hybrid image mode and support 8K video recording.
In other words, this does not mean that all photos taken by the iPhone will be 48MP. The camera is also expected to use pixel binning to improve color accuracy and low-light performance and use multi-pixel synthesis to improve image quality for low-light photos. Samsung’s Galaxy S21 has already used this technology.
In addition, Guo Mingchi predicts that a periscope or folding lens can be used for the iPhone that will debut in 2023. The periscope lens uses a complex arrangement of prisms and mirrors to create a longer path for light to pass through the lens assembly, thereby achieving a larger range of optical zoom than traditional lenses.
Apple has a number of patents on related lens systems, so it is well known that the company is studying this field. Of course, Android mobile phone manufacturers have already adopted similar designs, and I don’t know what improvements Apple will make.