While its Snapdragon 820 has just been introduced, Qualcomm continues to communicate on the improvements offered within its products and explains today why smartphones equipped with its latest processor will offer better night photos.
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As we had already seen during its presentation, the Snapdragon 820 processor is equipped with a new ISP, by which we mean the chip dedicated to processing images captured with the photo sensor. And it is on this technology that the chip manufacturer wanted today to expand through a blog post and a video.
This year, Android smartphones have taken a big step forward, in terms of photography, in particular, with regard to night photos. Although one of the best in this field, the Galaxy S6, does not equip itself with a Qualcomm Soc, the chip manufacturer now takes all the credit for these improvements which, according to him, are due to the technologies present in its Snapdragon 808 and 810 processors and cites as examples the LG G4, OnePlus 2 and Nexus 5X and 6P.
And with its Snapdragon 820, Qualcomm intends to go even further. The ISP Spectra found in the Soc incorporates three technologies aimed at reducing noise in low-light photos. As we explained in our smartphone photo sensor folder, the lower the light, the higher the sensor will increase its ISO to compensate. But that says higher ISO sensitivity also says more noise on the images.
Fortunately, Qualcomm has thought of everything and its ISP Spectra articulates its noise reduction on three axes: wave reduction, time reduction and cleaning of noisy areas of the shots. All this remains, of course, theory, but according to the video below, it seems to work pretty well. It remains to be seen how manufacturers will implement all this in their future products.
