Sometimes even the best-kept secrets can leave a trail of clues, and when the world’s biggest tech companies start buying components in unexpectedly large quantities, it’s a sure sign that something significant is about to happen.

This is exactly what seems to be happening right now in the world of high-end smartphones, with both Apple AAPL -0.08% and Samsung reportedly buying up much larger than usual quantities of camera sensors.

According to a report in ETNEWS, components such as autofocus actuators, filters, memory and semiconductors are also seeing increased demand, fuelling speculation that both companies are incorporating additional camera modules into future handsets. Yes, that means more than one rear-facing camera per phone.

So what does all this mean? A strong hint comes from April this year whenApple bought LinX Imaging at a price of around $20 million. LinX Imaging specialises in “multi aperture imaging technology”, which essentially combines multiple lenses and sensors into single camera modules. The “multi apertures” referred to here don’t, in this case, mean multiple different f-stops behind a single lens, but multiple discrete holes through which light is gathered by independent sets of lenses and sensors built into the same camera module.

Multi aperture cameras offer many possible benefits including 3D imaging, artistically blurred backgrounds and the ability to re-focus images after the fact. More importantly, they offer the possibility of vastly improving bottom-line image quality without the need for bulky DSLR-style lenses which simply wouldn’t fit into a smartphone.

ETNEWS claims such multi-aperture camera modules are the likely reason for the increase in demand for their related components. The article also suggests that Samsung too has been making moves towards multi-aperture smartphone cameras, claiming that the Exynos 7420 chip, as found in the Galaxy S6 series, already offers support for dual-camera functions.

If both Apple and Samsung were to launch multi-aperture camera systems, it could mark one of the biggest shifts in consumer-level photography in many years.

Could multi-aperture cameras really change everything? Essentially yes, I believe they could. A multi-aperture camera system may seem like a strange idea at first, but it’s much more than a gimmick and is a proven design often found in nature. Those of us lucky enough to possess two eyes will attest to that, but many much smaller creatures, such as spiders, have developed multiple eyes. This is a concept taken to the extreme in the compound eyes found in many insects.

Of course, employing a chipset with support for multi-camera imaging is no guarantee that such a camera will be used: Multi-camera processing is also present in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series which offers support for up to four cameras, including 3D capture and the ability to merge data from the individual cameras into 55 megapixel images.

However, while the Snapdragon 800 series features in Android handsets from most of the major manufacturers, the vast majority of these do not implement multi-aperture imaging technology.

New technologies like this need to be implemented well if they are to succeed. HTC HTC bravely installed a dual-aperture style camera in the One M8 flagship only to ditch it in favour of a more traditional single-lens version in its successor, the One M9. However, this year’s Honor 6 Plus (based on an entirely different own-brand chipset from Huawei) features a true dual-aperture camera system and has received more favourable reviews.

However, neither Apple nor Samsung is likely to implement such a feature unless it’s going to work very well indeed. Apple in particular maintains such a small range of handsets that experimenting with such a feature would could spell disaster were it not to succeed. Consequently I have some doubts about ETNEWS’ claim that we will see the technology in major new phones very soon. That said I’d love to be proved wrong, because the potential is certainly there for this to be a real game changer.

By: DocMemory
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