Gadgetory

for smartphone camera enthusiasts one of the more interesting announcements which came out of MWC 2016 was actually pretty quiet as huawei and like announced they were entering into a long-term partnership for future smartphone cameras so what does that mean when a traditional camera manufacturer works with a smartphone manufacturer and how might that affect future Huawei phones I'm Vaughn Carlos back now for PocketNow and we're gonna take a quick look at mobile photography team-ups for smartphones we like to think that each manufacturer is an island and they're waging war against their competing rivals but there's actually a lot more cooperation going on behind the scenes than many people realize we already have a pretty good idea that Qualcomm is manufacturing a majority of the chipsets and processors for phones out in the ecosystem Samsung might be making RAM or flash memory for phones other than galaxies and of course Sony is probably the most popular camera sensor manufacturer so how important might it be to have third-party branding for a specific phone technology I mean if we take a look at audio for example HTC has a reputation for building really high quality music playing phones either from the speakers or from the headphone jack and they've moved from beat licensing to Dolby certification on their smartphones so for Dolby to approve HTC slapping their logo on their phones HTC has to have built a phone which meets the standards of Dolby licensing a partnership for the camera is probably gonna work in a similar way but there is a little bit more room or a little bit more range for how two companies might interact with each other if we look at a Lumia smartphone Zeiss is the company responsible for the optics the actual lenses in the phone but Microsoft has their own branding for the camera sensor technology it's called pure view the result of that partnership is a camera with excellent optics and fantastic pixel level detail Zeiss as a lens manufacturer doesn't seem to have any qualifications for image processing we saw noticeable improvements for blackberry after a partnership deal the camera on the passport I would have rated as acceptable there's a huge jump moving up to the prif now the privies utilizing a Schneider lens and again we saw improvements to pixel level detail clarity contrast and color now part of that is ISO just to the image processing the camera app on the blackberry was a huge improvement over the passport but that's a pretty magical combination when you can improve both software and hardware in one generation now some manufacturers are able to achieve very good results even when they're building everything themselves everything's in-house Samsung is probably the gold standard for a company which can do everything from the fabrication of the image sensor to grinding the glass to create all of the lenses for their Galaxy smartphones well when we look at manufacturers but don't have the same kind of in-house experience at building their own camera equipment and they don't have any kind of third-party relationship with some kind of camera manufacturer we do see a few weaknesses the LG v10 is packing my favorite overall camera experience but the lens performance on this phone is actually one of its weakest aspects it's a little more prone to aberrations and distortions but that's got to be weighed against having one of the absolute best camera apps I've ever seen some fantastic image processing and color rendition and they're currently the only manufacturer taking into account things like audio control while shooting video which in a roundabout way brings us back to quality now Huawei makes good cameras for their phones this is the honor 5x $200 phone perfectly reasonable camera experience at that price point and before MWC we put out our review on the mate 8 which had a respectable camera just wasn't anything mind-blowing what's interesting about this partnership liked it in the past has been a very conservative or traditional company a long time ago they built their reputation for building incredible film cameras with fantastic lenses if you take a second to look up with a rangefinder camera is chances are probably pretty good that they're going to use a Leica as the example and for many of their more recent camera bodies they're actually taking parts from Panasonic and kind of tweaking them to their own Lycus standards if the Huawei like a partnership is more than just skin deep more than just like us applying a couple lens elements for huawei phones we could actually see some pretty terrific benefits for both companies Huawei earns instant respect from camera enthusiasts in much the same way that many people celebrate the Zeiss optics on Lumia phones but like a stands to benefit from having a firm producing bleeding edge technology which can introduce like a branding to a completely new demographic of consumers we already know that Leica and Panasonic have a pretty decent relationship and panasonic has tried to produce their own android-powered hardware in the past with the cm-1 huawei work with Leica and utilizing Panasonic's one inch camera sensor could be an evolutionary leap over how we currently produce smartphone cameras that's really grandiose long-term thinking kind of my personal wishlist for what I hope to see in a future smartphone now thanks to leaked Master General Evan blaze we've already seen some really high quality slides on what the qua way p9 is going to look like and that's gonna be the first phone with like a branding and one of the interesting things about that phone is it's going to be a dual-camera sensor device now this is a really early leak so we don't quite know yet how those dual cameras are going to interact with each other if they're going to be used for depth of field tricks or 3d imaging similar to what HTC was trying to do on the m8 or if one camera sensor is a wider angle lens and another's a narrower angle lens like we see on the LG g5 or if they're just two of the exact same sensors designed to help improve low-light imaging and HDR performance thanks to advanced software compositing it's really exciting watching one of the highest selling smartphone manufacturers partner up with such a well-respected camera brand and I think the benefits for both companies here could be profound but of course we want to hear from you what improvements do you most want to see in a future smartphone camera better optics higher resolution sensors larger sensors faster frame rates better image processing definitely drop a comment below this is the kind of stuff I love getting into and hopefully we'll find some really fun debates down in the comments as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more in-depth coverage on smartphone content creation topics and be sure to hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video now you know your camera snob when you keep your phone's on tables face down because you're more worried about scratching the lens cover than you are the screen