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Apple Details Three-Sensor iPhone Camera

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Future iPhones could deliver vastly superior colour reproduction and low-light performance, according to Apple’s latest patent, spotted yesterday by the ever-vigilant Apple Insider.

According to the patent, which has been granted, the company is designing a camera featuring three separate imaging sensors. Each sensor would be designed to capture a single primary colour component, the results then being combined into a full colour image with three times the colour information recorded by standard single-sensor systems.

Three sensors and zoom lenses

The US Patent No. 8,988,564 is entitled, “Digital camera with light splitter”, and details how a light splitter cube could be used to split incoming light into three separate colour channels, each emerging at a different face of the cube.A sensor placed at each corresponding face then captures the light for each single-colour channel, with the resulting image data being combined into a full-colour image by the camera software.

The patent as described, builds upon a previous patent, which employs movable zoom lens elements and an adjustable mirror in a periscope-like arrangement designed to deliver optical image stabilisation.

Big quality improvements

Mounted sideways in the phone, a new camera based on these technologies could provide a true optical zoom lens with considerably improved image quality, but without significantly increasing the thickness of the phone.

Most single-sensor cameras, the iPhone included, use a grid of coloured filters to divide the total number of pixels available into red, green, or blue types. The most common type, known as a Bayer filter, divides them in the proportion of 50% green, 25% red and 25% blue. The camera must then interpolate these single-colour outputs into a full colour image. The result is that two-thirds of the colour you see in the final JPEG is actually the result of guesswork and clever mathematics.

Using three discrete sensors in one way around this: The colours are split before reaching the sensors, so no colour filters are required.

Modern smartphones have all but replaced the compact camera, and with higher-quality capture combined with the potential for internal optical zoom lenses, the need for a traditional camera among non-professionals will decrease further still. I suspect commercial implementations of designs such as this are a long way off, don’t expect quite anything this radical for the iPhone 6S, but Apple is certainly very serious about taking the iPhone camera way beyond what it’s capable of today.