Right now, the biggest trend in the best camera phones is AI. Every smartphone maker uses machine learning to make photos look better through image processing. Both Google and Samsung are using generative AI in the Pixel 8 and the upcoming Galaxy S24 series to let users do things like animate subjects or fill in backgrounds.
But what if the photo you took looked great the first time, with accurate colors and white balance? Spectricity is hoping to make a splash in this space, and at CES 2024 showed off the first multispectral camera in a phone designed to enable “true colors” in smartphone images.
I know what you might be thinking. Google has already made a huge deal about its Real Tone technology, which will be introduced with the Pixel 7 series in 2023. But as impressive as it is, it was only designed to reproduce the most accurate skin tones. spectrophotometer for Everything You can catch.
The company claims that its S1 multispectral camera can evaluate colors more accurately than the naked eye. It can sense 16 different wavelengths simultaneously, replacing the error-prone AWB algorithms used with RGB sensors. We got our first demo of Spectricity last year, but now it's built its technology into a smartphone prototype.
During a demo comparing the Spectricity camera to the Google Pixel 7 Pro, they both took a photo of a dark-skinned doll with pink paper in the background. But Google's phone had difficulties producing accurate colors, and objects turned different colors in captured images when the LED lights changed from warm white to neutral white and cool white.
Meanwhile, Spectricity footage was much closer to what I saw and remained fairly consistent throughout. I wish they'd chosen the Pixel 8 Pro as a more recent example, but the differences were still impressively stark.
In the second demo using a model camera phone with a Spectricity sensor, he took a photo of an orange shirt and then searched for that color via an app. It definitely matches perfectly with the vibrant orange color on the Pantone color matching tool.
Better-looking images are just one application of Spectricity's multispectral imaging. It could be used in e-commerce, as well as makeup applications, and may help identify diseases and skin diseases.
Spectricity says it is working with almost every smartphone manufacturer to test its solution. While the press release states that this camera “could be in any smartphone within a couple of years,” Spectricity CEO Vincent Mouret told me we could see a phone with this camera as soon as 2025.
We can't wait to test this sensor in a phone with a main camera to see if it really lives up to the hype.
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