Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Deepfakes have been a thing for a while now, and they’ve been used for fun, useful, but also malicious purposes. Samsung has now introduced yet another deepfake tool that turns a single still image into a creepily accurate video.
Samsung’s Megapixel portraits, or MegaPortraits, is able to create high-resolution human avatars. All it needs is a single portrait, and it doesn’t even have to be a photo – you can also turn paintings into moving portraits, for some extra creepiness.
There’s been a lot of hype about Samsung’s ridiculously high-resolution ISOCELL sensors, particularly their most recent 200-megapixel ISOCELL HP1 and ISOCELL HP3 sensors. While there have been at least one confirmed devices coming that contain the ISOCELL HP1, we haven’t seen any images shot with them yet.
Well, now that’s changed as Chen Jin, General Manager of Motorola China has posted a photo that he says was shot using the 200-megapixel Samsung ISOCELL HP1 found in the triple camera setup of the Moto Edge 30 Ultra. It’s not the full 200-megapixel resolution, though. It uses the 4-in-1 pixel binning mode to produce a 50-megapixel result, but that’s still pretty nuts for a smartphone.
Samsung has announced their new ISOCELL HP3 200-megapixel CMOS smartphone camera sensor. This isn’t the first 200-megapixel sensor Samsung has produced, having announced the ISOCELL HP1 200MP last September. This new sensor, though, is even smaller, bringing that 0.64μm pixel size down to a microscopic 0.56μm. Yes, μm. That means each individual pixel measures only 0.00056mm x 0.00056mm.
The new sensor is 1/1.14″ type, which is about 20% smaller than its 1/1.22″ predecessor but still packs a whopping 200 megapixels. Using 4:1 Quad-pixel merging gives us 50 megapixels with 1.12μm pixels and it even supports 16:1 merging, bringing that up to 2.24μm per pixel for a 12.5-megapixel final result. Naturally, it also shoots 8K video and gives us 4K at up to 120fps with “minimal loss in the field of view”.
What is the internet best used for? You could argue that it’s sharing cat photos. Along this theme, Samsung chose a feline subject to demonstrate their 200-megapixel smartphone sensor. And they didn’t just demonstrate how good it is, they decided to blow up the captured image and display it on the side of a building, in gigantic furry detail.
Although the sensor hasn’t yet made it into the consumer phone market Samsung has evidently already decided to hype up the new sensor and wasn’t deterred by printing the image to a staggering 2,021 square feet.
Motorola is set to release a new smartphone in July. And if the fact that Motorola is still releasing smartphones at all wasn’t surprising enough, this one’s going to contain a 200-megapixel camera, the company has confirmed through a post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. It’s expected to be the long-rumoured Motorola Frontier and is being touted as a “new benchmark for image experience”.
The timing of the announcement is interesting after announcing just last week that it will be making use of the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 CPUs in an upcoming smartphone. There’s been no word on whether or not the 200-megapixel smartphone is going to be the one that contains the new Qualcomm chip or not but the non-Plus Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 can accept cameras up to 200mp, too.
Samsung Semiconductor has announced its newest UFS storage tech. UFS 4.0 uses Samsung’s 7th Gen V-NAND memory and with a proprietary controller that offers some insane read and write speeds as well as big power savings. Interestingly, Samsung did not choose to announce this via their usual Newsroom website but through Twitter. There were plenty of tweets, though, going over some of its specs.
Samsung’s UFS storage is intended primarily for use in smartphones, although with the number of Android-powered devices out there and cameras that run entire operating systems and feature internal storage, there is a lot of potential in other markets, too. And boasting read and write speeds of up to 4,200MB/sec and 2,800MB/sec respectively, they certainly seem capable of handling the demands of today’s high-resolution cameras.
Samsung’s 200-megapixel ISOCELL HP1 smartphone sensor has been creating quite a store since it was first rumoured back in January. For some, it’s got them very excited, while others have been quite critical without even having seen (let alone tried) a real working sensor inside a camera. But whatever your thoughts on it, it’s a pretty impressive feat.
A new promotional video about the new sensor has been released by Samsung explaining in simple terms how some of its features work, like its “ChameleonCell” technology, Smart-ISO multi-sampling and how they all adjust themselves depending on what it is you’re shooting.
If you’re thinking about picking up the new Samsung Galaxy Fold 3 for your smartphone photography needs and you’re a bit of a tinkerer, you might want to rethink that decision. This isn’t new news and was recently posted on XDA Developers, but it’s news that appears to have escaped the photography community so far. It seems that if you unlock the bootloader on the new Samsung Galaxy Fold 3, Samsung will disable all of your cameras.
Samsung has at last officially announced 2 new camera phone sensors. The first, after months of rumour and speculation, is a 200mp sensor that they have called the ISOCELL HP1 and will be the highest resolution camera phone sensor manufactured so far. The second is the 50mp sensor (ISOCELL GN5). Both sensors incorporate exciting cutting edge technology to improve various camera phone features, such as low light photography and faster focusing.
“Samsung has been pioneering ultrafine pixel technologies that are taking high-resolution image sensors to the next level,” said Duckhyun Chang, executive vice president of sensor business at Samsung Electronics.
Well, it looks like the Samsung + Olympus rumour from back in April might actually turn out to be true. I still think it’s an odd pairing, but GSMArena reports that not only is the Samsung Galaxy S22 is reported to not feature a new version of the 108-megapixel Samsung ISOCELL HM3 sensor, but it’ll have a new 200-megapixel Olympus branded camera module.
The news appears to come from Korean website Pulse News, citing “multiple industry sources”. So, I’d still treat this one as a rumour for now, but it’ll be quite interesting if it does happen. Olympus has never touched smartphones in the past, but perhaps this is one of the new directions the company is taking since its acquisition by JIP.
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!