Sony’s struggling smartphone division has made two crucial decisions:
- They entered a partnership with Light to create Smartphone cameras with very high quality photocameras
- Tech from the Sony Alpha division is from now on going ot be used on those phones
The new Xperia 1 is the first smartphone having EyeAf and built-in Luts:
In an interview with Trustedreviews Sony said:
Normally when you take a picture, the phone will then compress it into a JPEG and then add the noise reduction. How Alpha does it is that it takes the Raw image, adds the algorithm to reduce the noise on the Raw image, then compresses it to JPEG, then you put noise reduction on top. That’s how Alpha is doing it. From Xperia 1, that’s how Xperia 1 will do it as well
The knock-on effect was that Alpha guru Kimio Maki is now head of product development for Sony Mobile and actually stopped production on what would have been a Sony XZ4. “He said “okay, so we work with Alpha here, let’s take this bit, we work with the CineAlta brand, let’s bring this bit”. He opened up the whole of digital imaging for us.”
I wonder if that will finally change the fate of their afflicted smartphone business…