Your duckface better be flawless: Huawei's Nova 6 mobe has a needlessly powerful selfie camera
The middle ground of the smartphone market is a bit of a battleground. Manufacturers of all stripes – except Apple – keep flinging devices at punters with fairly high-end specs, but price tags under the £500 mark. The latest salvo comes from embattled Chinese comms giant Huawei, which today announced the launch of its Nova 6 …
COMMENTS
-
-
Friday 6th December 2019 00:54 GMT veti
We do these things differently in the west. Google knows pretty much everything I do online, and they also have a pretty good idea of everywhere I go. Mastercard and my bank know where I spend money. Microsoft and Valve know what games I play. The gov't knows where I drive or fly, and I assume they also have access (whether on demand, or through a more drawn out process) to all of the abovementioned companies' data as well.
But nobody cares enough about me to keep a lot of video footage, that's a very inefficient way to gather the sort of information that interests them.
-
Friday 6th December 2019 07:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
We do these things differently in the west. Google knows pretty much everything I do online, and they also have a pretty good idea of everywhere I go. Mastercard and my bank know where I spend money. Microsoft and Valve know what games I play.
Here's an idea. Go out with few friends, enjoy a nice BBQ and play a few co-op games.
-You won't need the gps for that day. Only your friends know where you are for that day.
-Your bank doesn't know what that grocery transaction means. Only your friends know what insanity you had at the BBQ that day.
-Microsoft and Valve only know the gaming time, but they won't know which of your friends beats the most bosses in the co-op game.
In the west, it is still a choice you can make.
-
-
-
Friday 6th December 2019 11:05 GMT Pascal Monett
No, you're not
I find the whole selfie thing revolting.
Pictures are to record the special things you've seen, to remember them later. If you're in the middle, you're taking up space uselessly. Of course you were there, you took the pic. You don't need to be in it to remember.
But you do need to be in it to show off. I hate that.
-
-
Friday 6th December 2019 09:12 GMT 89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921
-
-
Friday 6th December 2019 14:40 GMT defiler
Re: Needlessly powerful
Well, these high-powered sensors are generally hamstrung by small lenses. It's always been the way with compact cameras. The smaller the lens, the harder it is to avoid things like purple fringes at the boundary between dark and bright objects. So the fancy high-res jobs are really just capturing the lens flaws in more detail.
It gets a bit pointless.
-
Saturday 7th December 2019 14:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Needlessly powerful
You are aware that, these days, powerful software processing is used to mitigate lens and sensor defects?
Google camera (gcam) processing of low light (night mode) for instance, takes up to a second on todays 855 snapdragon based phones, considerably longer on older ones.
Claiming the processor is "too powerful" comes from the same line of thinking as "who needs more than 640K of RAM".
-
Monday 9th December 2019 12:18 GMT defiler
Re: Needlessly powerful
Not saying the processor is too powerful. I'm saying that the camera sensor is unreasonably powerful.
Sure you can do all of the post-processing to pick out details in dark images, and to stabilise the image etc, but when it comes to chromatic aberration you're going to hit a wall. There's some work you can do, and that can be tuned reasonably well to the individual lens, but in the end you're throwing away detail.
On the whole, for high-resolution work you're just better off with a bigger lens. For compact devices, don't over-egg the resolution. Saves power on the sensor too (although I believe they're not as bad as CCDs).
In the end, if you want a hugely powerful sensor it's not my place to stop you. I'm just pointing out that you end up with diminishing returns quite quickly when you're doing it on a small device.
-
-
-