Contemporary smartphone design seems to suggest that more cameras is better, and no modern tech company has stretched this idea as far as Light. In 2017, it released the L16, a $1,950 Android-based device with 16 cameras, as a supposed competitor to traditional digital cameras.
That same technology has made its way to phones, as Light recently worked with Nokia to put five cameras on the back of the Nokia 9 PureView, which recently went on sale in the US for $700. So how much better are 16 cameras working as one than five? Now that the Nokia 9 PureView and the L16 are both on the market, we took them out for a side-by-side comparison.
We’ve also included shots from the iPhone XS, the reviewer’s personal smartphone, to give context to what Light’s multi-camera fusion can provide. In the photos below, the order below stays consistent, from left to right the order is: iPhone, L16, Nokia 9. The images are not color-corrected, were exported at the highest quality possible, and cropped consistently as possible to show details in the images.
The Nokia 9 PureView actually shows the most detail in a majority of the photos we took with all three devices. On the image above, the slight pitting on the robot’s plastic is the most defined on the Nokia image, and the color is most accurately represented.Light tells Quartz that there are two main differences between L16 and the Nokia 9
PureView: The phone uses a newer processing chip to stitch the photos together, and the Nokia phone has different cameras that capture more light. Three of the Nokia 9’s cameras only capture black and white, which allows a monochrome mode, and the cameras to capture detail in a different way.
No comments:
Post a Comment