Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Lossless digital zoom?

Wow iPhone lens case.


This gang says they have a case with iPhone lenses which “rival the performance of a 200mm camera”. 
I never heard of such a thing as a "200mm camera", must be too advanced for me. 
(Seriously, I’m confused, are they referring the focal length of the lens, or the physical size of the camera, or… ?)


… Oh, they also claim to have the first digital zoom which is lossless. That should get global headlines! So far we've always heard that it's impossible to create details in a picture if it wasn't captured by the camera in the first place. If they have solved this, it's a scientific quantum leap of magnitude! 
(Of course I don't believe they have that, it's probably regular upsampling like you get in Photoshop, the app simply add pixels based on the average of neighboring pixels. It prevents huge pixels, but it adds no detail, it just makes blur.) 

2 comments:

emptyspaces said...

Just like "lossless compression" of audio files!

Ken said...

You have to wonder why a company that seems to have some backing then needs to get $50,000 to make it's first production run. It could be because they don't want to dilute their ownership, but they could probably borrow the money, unless they are already with excessive debt.