Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

It has entered the last ten days of 2022, and the mainstream mobile phone manufacturers have also launched their own flagship phones in the second half of the year. Looking at these flagship mobile phones, we can find one thing in common, that is, the general image as one of the core selling points.

This is also the case. If you want to ask what is the biggest technology direction of the smartphone industry in the past two years, it must be images. The major manufacturers have worked hard on the product cameras, and mobile phone photography has indeed made a huge leap in recent years. It is no exaggeration to say that at present, except for professional photography, mobile phones are a better choice than cameras in other shooting scenes.

You don't believe me? Let's take the flagship Android phones on the market as an example to take a closer look.

These Snapdragon 8 + flagship phones, the photo shoot is not covered. Speaking of the Android flagship phones released this year, they are basically equipped with Snapdragon 8 or Snapdragon 8 + mobile platform, which is an important factor in their strong imaging ability. Generally speaking, when it comes to the reasons that affect mobile phone photography, many users may think of sensors, optical lenses, etc., and the SoC platform carried by mobile phones is also a crucial factor, because it provides the most basic ability for mobile phone image quality, which can be said to be the "soul" of mobile phone images.

Specifically, the Snapdragon 8Snapple 8 + mobile platform uses Snapdragon Sight Snapdragon imaging technology, which combines a series of mobile image features, with the seventh generation Qualcomm AI engine to provide the bottom line for the phone's imaging capabilities.

Snapdragon 8 +'s Snapdragon Sight centers on the new Spectra ISP, the first 18-bit ISP specially built for mobile terminals, which can capture 4096 times as much image data as the previous platform, bringing huge improvements in dynamic range, color and clarity to photos and videos. At the same time, Spectra ISP can process 3.2 megapixels per second, enabling a single camera to capture 1.08 megapixels in 30FPS. It also supports 8K HDR video capture on smartphones for the first time, and can shoot in more than 1 billion colors in HDR10 + format.

The powerful seventh-generation Qualcomm AI engine can support 3A algorithms (auto-exposure, auto-focus and auto-white balance). With strong AI performance, it can automatically adjust the parameters such as focus, exposure and white balance to the ideal state, press the shutter to produce a blockbuster, and better cooperate with the super multi-frame engine of Snapdragon Sight Snapdragon imaging technology, capturing 30 pictures at once in low light environment, through multi-frame synthesis technology. Greatly improve the night scene brightness and with the help of AI algorithm for noise reduction and color restoration.

Having said that, let's take a look at how high the Snapdragon 8 + mobile platform can bring the image of the flagship mobile phone through real machine performance.

First of all, let's take a look at the Xiaomi 12s series, which was just released in July. Take the top Xiaomi 12s Ultra as an example, this new Snapdragon 8 + image flagship has a combination of 5000 megapixel master camera + 4800 megapixel ultra-wide angle and 4800 megapixel periscope telephoto.

In the daily photo shoot, we often encounter some scenes with strong light contrast, these scenes often need to be adjusted in a tedious later stage because of the Hold of the camera, which can be taken with a mobile phone. For example, in the highlight scene taken with Xiaomi 12s Ultra, there is almost no difference between turning on HDR and turning off HDR. On the contrary, the direct photo is more natural, with accurate exposure and clear details at the end of the dim wooden ladder, backlit branches and leaves, and the sky in the distance. This is the most intuitive gain that Snapdragon 8 + mobile platform brings to the basic photo quality.

Then there is the capture scene, such as the recent photo of the dog below, pressing the shutter at the moment it moves, accurate and fast autofocus so that the dog in the photo does not paste at all, the details of the hair are clearly visible, and the sky in the narrow alley behind the dog is processed with high dynamic range under the AI algorithm, the sky is not overexposed at all, and the whole picture feels very comfortable. This is a straight picture that is difficult to be taken by high-end cameras.

If it is night, the camera needs to set up a tripod to shoot the scene, with the powerful low-light shooting ability of Snapdragon 8 +, Xiaomi 12s Ultra can also be shot in one shot, such as the following one, the photo is bright, bright, clear and pure, and the lights of the distant shopping malls are not obviously overexposed. These are obviously inseparable from the powerful computing support provided by Spectra ISP and the seventh generation AI engine in night scene noise reduction, multi-frame synthesis and so on.

In addition, we often encounter scenes of photographing people in daily photography, which may be the strong point of the camera, but now mobile phone photography is comparable to the camera. For example, the following portrait photo of Xiaomi 12s Ultra, the figure is clear and sharp, the virtual effect of the large aperture of the background analog camera is natural and real, and more importantly, the optimization of the character's face by mobile phone photography completely eliminates the need for post-revision steps of the traditional camera, simple and good-looking.

In addition to Xiaomi 12s Ultra, let's take Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4, a recently released folding screen phone, as an example. This phone focuses on the folding screen experience, on the contrary, it can better see the image "hard power" that Snapdragon 8 + can show on Galaxy Z Fold4.

For example, the following two large backlight photos taken in the mountains are taken in ultra-wide-angle and wide-angle subjects, respectively. Both photos have ultra-high dynamic range, with nearby green leaves, distant woods, mountains, sky and sun, all of which are exposed accurately and brightly enough to make the photos look transparent.

There is also the following main photo of the top of the mountain, the most impressive is the color fineness, the near blue sky, the transition to the distant white red clouds, the whole color looks bright and layered, which is obviously also due to the richer color restoration ability brought by Snapdragon 8 + 18-bit Spectra ISP.

In addition to photos, Snapdragon 8 +'s ability for mobile phone images is also reflected in video shooting ability, especially night scene video shooting ability. Here we take Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4 as an example. The author chose to shoot flowers in a darkroom with a resolution of 4K. The brightness of the surrounding environment is as follows:

But the effect of the video shot is as follows:

The bright picture has exceeded that seen by the naked eye, and more importantly, the purity of the picture is also very high, and the color of the flowers is also accurate and bright, and there is no color deviation or dimness, which is amazing. Considering that this is a 4K resolution video, Snapdragon 8+ needs real-time lighting, noise reduction, correction, color restoration and other operations for each frame, and the amount of pixels processed instantly is very large, as well as the assistance of AI image algorithm and computing power, which fully demonstrates the strong pixel throughput ability of Snapdragon 8+Spectra ISP, the powerful AI computing power of the seventh generation Qualcomm AI engine and the advanced AI image algorithm.

In short, through a series of examples above, I believe you can understand how Snapdragon 8 + mobile platform uses Snapdragon Sight Snapdragon imaging technology and Qualcomm AI engine to carry the image strength of flagship mobile phones, and can further understand the key role of SoC platform on mobile phone image performance. In fact, if you look at the progress of mobile phone photography, it is very synchronized with the evolution of SoC imaging ability. Without the base of SoC, mobile phone image is a wood without roots and a source without water.

Snapdragon mobile platform and mobile phone images, which have to be said to help review the development of smartphone images, is probably an evolutionary history made up of a variety of technology trends and trends. Here CTOnews.com is also illustrated by the evolution of different technology trends.

For example, in the early era of single photography, the core problem that plagued the major mobile phone manufacturers was the effect of night scene shooting. At that time, although mobile phone manufacturers would improve the night shooting effect by means of optical anti-shake and increasing the unit pixel size, these methods were ultimately reflected in the imaging link, which was inseparable from the optimization of the original image information at the bottom of the mobile phone SoC. So on the Snapdragon 820 mobile platform in 2015, Qualcomm brought powerful picture noise reduction functions to mobile phone manufacturers through the new Spectra ISP. As a result, the purity of the night picture taken by the mobile phone at that time has been significantly improved. And Spectra ISP also specially improved the support of HDR effect in the night scene part, which further enhanced the night shooting level of the mobile phone at that time. The Xiaomi 5S, which had amazing night shooting results that year, was equipped with the Snapdragon 821 mobile platform, which is homologous to Snapdragon 820.

After shooting alone, around 2016, dual cameras began to be popular in the smartphone market, which coincided with the time when Snapdragon 820Snapdragon 821 became the first choice of SoC for all flagship phones. The popularity of dual cameras was inseparable from Snapdragon 820's support for dual and triple cameras at that time, and the era of multiple cameras began to become the basic function of smartphones.

There are many directions for multi-camera applications, but at that time, the most common and most recognized by consumers were for 2x optical zoom and virtual portrait mode, which was already supported in the Snapdragon 820 era, so Qualcomm focused on strengthening its support for multi-camera optical zoom on the Spectra 180 dual ISP of Snapdragon 835 mobile platform in 2017, supporting up to 3200 megapixel single camera and double 1600 megapixel camera. So in that year, a main camera with a 2x optical zoom camera became the choice of almost all dual-camera phones.

It is also worth mentioning here that optical zoom has become a key direction in the development of smartphone images the year after next, from 2x light change in the early stage to 3x light change, 5x light change, and even 10x light change later. At the same time, mobile phones are equipped with more and more cameras, in addition to telephoto lenses and ultra-wide-angle lenses. Such a flagship phone may cover as many as 3-4 main focal lengths, which may be used in practice. The fluency of these focal switching affects the experience. At this point, Snapdragon Mobile platform works with Spectra ISP through AI engine to support smooth switching of optical zoom based on AI at the bottom of the platform a long time ago, so now we use multi-camera phones to switch smoothly and naturally in different focal segments.

In addition to multiple cameras, smartphone images began to expand a new track for AI photography before 2018, when the main function was AI scene recognition, such as when you are shooting flowers, the phase will be identified through AI to optimize the photo effect of the "plant" scene.

But in fact, Qualcomm has supported scene recognition when taking photos since the Snapdragon 820 era, when Spectra ISP already had the ability to recognize objects and scenes, and was able to automatically optimize the scene according to the identified results. This is essentially because Qualcomm introduced the first generation artificial intelligence engine Zeroth from Snapdragon 820 to the Snapdragon 845 mobile platform in 2018, and the artificial intelligence engine evolved to the third generation. It can be seen that Qualcomm has made a prediction for the application of AI in mobile phone images from a long time ago, and continues to develop. It can be said that it is precisely because of the accumulation process of Snapdragon Mobile platform in "AI images" that the application of AI scene recognition in 2018 is so hot.

With the more and more in-depth application of AI in mobile phone images, today there is a louder name: computational photography, which is the hottest development trend of mobile phone images. If you want to ask the main promoter of the development of mobile computing photography, Snapdragon mobile platform must be indispensable. Take the latest Snapdragon 8Compact 8 + mobile platform, whose seventh-generation AI engine takes four times faster reasoning time than the previous AI engine in a wide range of AI model use cases, while AI energy efficiency is 1.7 times faster than the previous generation, and the performance of AI software has also improved twofold. Its imaging application has been mentioned before. In addition, the new generation of Spectra ISP, combined with AI engine, can realize many innovative computational photography applications through super multi-frame engine, more powerful face recognition, scheduling of three cameras, etc., and become a leader in promoting the progress and development of computational photography.

The last thing we can't forget is the video shooting in the mobile phone image. As video has become more and more important media in recent years, the proportion of video shooting in mobile phone images is increasing. And Snapdragon Mobile platform's support for video shooting has always been top-notch. They have been strengthening video recording since the Snapdragon 835 era, introducing EIS 3 (Electronic Image Stabilization) function, supporting 4K HDR video, and improving the color performance of video shooting through "Clear Sight" technology.

Snapdragon 845 mobile platform introduces the support of Ultra HD Premium video shooting. Snapdragon 855 era first supports HDR10 + video shooting, and allows real-time video shooting, object classification and object segmentation in the state of 4K HDR@60fps, providing more games for mobile video shooting.

In this way, on the latest Snapdragon 8 + mobile platform, the new 18-bit ISP has been able to support 8K HDR video shooting on smartphones, while 8K HDR video can also be filmed in HDR10 + format, and the shooting power consumption has been reduced by 50% compared with the previous generation. We can now shoot ultra-high-definition and gorgeous HDR videos with our smartphones, and create all kinds of videos easily and quickly, which is behind the strong support of Snapdragon Mobile platform.

Conclusion Smart phones have made continuous breakthroughs in images over the years, which is undoubtedly exciting. It has profoundly changed the way we record our lives with images. In the past, when we went out to play and took pictures on business, we always had to hold heavy cameras and tripods. Now, as long as a mobile phone is enough, we can get rid of the shackles, freeze the beautiful moments in life anytime and anywhere, and record which important moments. Or give full play to their own creativity and create good works. Such an approach would have been unthinkable years or decades ago.

Behind such breakthroughs and changes, we should not only thank mobile phone manufacturers for their efforts and technological progress in image devices such as sensors, but also should not forget the huge role played by SoC platforms like Snapdragon Mobile platform, which are like the huge roots of towering trees and the vast water source of surging rivers, which always provide continuous power for technological progress and industrial breakthroughs. Driven by this driving force, mobile phone images are bound to move towards a more dreamy future.

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