Oppo Introduces New Smartphone Camera Tech Including Continuous Optical Zoom And More

Chinese manufacturer Oppo on Thursday made some camera-related announcements, soon after the company revealed its “next generation” under-display front camera technology earlier this month. Oppo is known for demonstrating camera technology long before it makes it to the market. During Thursday’s “Future Imaging Technology” event, Oppo announced a new telephoto lens with continuous optical zoom. This, unlike the Perisope lenses used in many smartphones today, make the lens elements move throughout the 85-200mm equivalent zoom range, meaning that the images will be crisp at every focal length without the need for digital zoom, cropping, or artificial sharpening.

The new module from Oppo starts at an 85mm focal length, which is considered a common focal length for portrait headshots, and could make it a lot more versatile. Oppo points out that using one camera across various focal lengths ensures consistent performance in terms of colour and white balance. Oppo has not detailed as to when this technology may ship on a commercial device’s camera. Apart from the continous optical zoom tech, Oppo also announced a five-axis image stabilisation system that makes use of both lens-shift and sensor-shift technologies as well as movement data from the phone’s gyroscope. Lens shifting is used for more gradual stabilisation, while sensor shift is applied in more dramatic situations, and includes the ability to roll the sensor as well as the long X and Y axis’. Oppo claims that its new image stabilisation tech allows for three times better stabilisation than you can achieve with regular optical image stabilisation modules.

Unlike the zoom lens, Oppo confirmed the time-frame for the image stabilisation tech, saying that it will start appearing in smartphones in the first quarter of 2022.

Oppo also announced a new image sensor that uses an RGBW sub-pixel layout, adding extra white subpixels in order to achieve a 60 percent increae in light sensitivity. Oppo said that earlier attempts at RGBW sensors had their limitations, but said that the new effort should make a big difference due to a more advanced manufactuing process and improved algorithms. This, the company says will make it to smartphones shipping in Q4 2021.

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