Qualcomm wants mobile cameras to match professional cameras within five years

Qualcomm wants phone cameras to meet the needs of professional photographers in the next five years, according to its VP of Product Management for Camera, Judd Heape.

"I want the user to have more creative control, I want the ability for a real photographer to do everything they want to do on a smartphone that they can do on a mirrorless [camera]," said Heape in an interview with WhistleOut.

"I want to get there in the next in the next five years."

Qualcomm manufactures the chipsets found in many Android phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S22 family and the OPPO Find X5 Pro. These chipsets have image signal processors, which are closely tied to a phone's camera performance.

The image signal processor in Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset enables phone builders to utilise new camera features like semantic segmentation. This functionality makes the camera aware of individual elements in a photo - facial features, hair, clothes, and skies, for example - and allows it to optimise and tune each individually.

Features like this are the cornerstone of Qualcomm’s phone camera ambitions, but Heape still says there are areas where he hopes to see improvement.

“The thing I want to make sure that we do well is good, smooth, seamless zoom.”

Seamless zoom is when a camera can achieve different levels of zoom with just a single lens, rather than needing multiple lenses. On most phones, you have a 1x lens and then a 3x lens. Everything in between is digital zoom, which results in lesser picture quality.

Conversely, a traditional camera lens would allow you to stop anywhere between 1x and 3x, which keeps images crisp at any magnification.

Sony has already started experimenting with this kind of optical zoom in its phones. The Xperia 1 IV (not available in Australia) has a telephoto lens that mechanically moves between 3.5x and 5.2x zoom. OPPO last year demonstrated similar camera tech, but it has yet to appear in a phone.

Another pain point is the lack of camera symmetry. On current phones, each camera tends to have different capabilities, which can result in photos that don’t look like they were taken by the same camera.

"I think the asymmetries are sort of annoying," said Heape.

He pointed to seamless zoom as a way to address this.

"One of the things we can do to eliminate all of these inconsistencies between cameras is go back to using one camera, or maybe two cameras; by building in more creative optics where it's an actual zoom lens. Rather than having a 0.5x, a 1x, and 10x, have one camera that can do 1x to 10x."

"Therefore you've gotten rid of the extra power consumption by the third camera, you've gotten rid of the inconsistency and the jump in transition."

Heape says power consumption is currently one of the biggest challenges in advancing mobile camera technology. While he says Snapdragon chips give him an “unlimited processing budget” for advanced camera functionality, he doesn't have unlimited power.

"I think what we need to do is keep improving power consumption, lowering it," said Heape.

Heape says power consumption is a current limitation preventing mobile cameras from using even more advanced artificial intelligence, which is one of the most important tools in getting better images from phone cameras.

"We need more power budget. The more power budget we get, the more artificial intelligence we can do and that's how we're going to improve image quality."

Heape is also expecting to see more traditional camera companies partner with phone manufacturers, which he says will benefit the industry as a whole.

"You'll start to get some of these 100 and 200-year-old companies that have a tradition in optics and very creative camera techniques, and I think it'll improve the ecosystem," said Heape.

"The camera markets are shrinking, the digital point-and-shoot cameras are gone. DSLRs are gone. Mirrorless cameras still remain but a lot of them are really expensive. I think in order for the traditional camera companies to grow in revenue, they're going to have to do more in the mobile space."

So far, we've seen brands like Huawei, Nokia, and OPPO, partner with Leica, Zeiss, and Hasselblad, respectively. Heape believes Huawei, for example, "really benefitted" from being able to associate with a "big camera name".

Despite the room improvement, Heape says that “most users, like 90% of people, think that they don’t need anything else [other than their smartphone]” for photography.

“I’m very proud of that”.

Disclosure: This author attended Snapdragon Summit as a guest of Qualcomm

Alex Choros

Managing Editor + Group Telco Editor | X | Instagram | Threads | LinkedIn

Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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