By now, just about everyone knows that digital zoom is a great way to ruin a shot on a smartphone or camera. When you zoom digitally, all you’re doing is making the pixels bigger, and that soon leads to fuzzy, blocky, blurry photos.
Optical zoom — some call it “lossless zoom” — is different. By moving the camera lenses, the actual image — the light itself — can be magnified before it ever reaches the camera sensor. You can zoom to the limit of the lens/camera design with no loss of clarity due to pixel-enlargement.
But it’s hard to build moving lenses in a thin smartphone design. In fact, it’s hard to build any decent-quality lenses into extremely thin packages. This is why many smartphones with good cameras have a “lens wart” on the back: That’s the thickness needed to stack the lenses the camera requires.
But the folks at Oppo have come up with a brilliant alternative. They didn’t think outside the box; they thought across the box.
It’s one of those head-smacking, “totally obvious now that I’ve seen it” designs: Instead of stacking lenses perpendicular to the camera body — the usual way — the Oppo engineers use a prism to turn the light path sideways as it enters the camera. That way, the optical path uses the width of the camera (not the thickness), and that leaves plenty of room for lenses and lens movement.
A new camera with this 10x optical zoom is due out very soon. (Info.)
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