In case you don’t know, Huawei, yes, the China-based smartphone company that was on its way to overthrowing both Apple and Samsung combined before the infamous US ban, surprisingly, is still in the business of making phones, and not just any phone, but flagships phones, and like it or not, come September 6, yeah, that’s exactly a day before the almighty Apple announces the iPhone 14 lineup, Huawei will be climbing the stage to announce its next flagship “Mate” device, the Huawei Mate 50 series.
But what’s more interesting is that, rumor has it that this Mate 50 smartphones will try to resurrect a feature that we once used to see on Samsung smartphones in the past, the variable aperture camera.
Yes, if you were here during the time of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S10 smartphones, then you should be familiar with this feature.
So, what does a variable aperture do?
Well, to answer that question, you first have to know what the word “Aperture” means in a camera.
So, in layman’s terms, Aperture simply means an opening in the camera lens that lets light pass through and get to the camera sensor.
Aperture is calculated in F-stops, for instance, the most common ones we have in smartphone cameras today ranges from f/1.5 to f/2.4. The smaller this number gets simply means the bigger the opening of the lens, so for instance, a lot of you might be thinking that f/2.4 has a bigger opening than f/1.5, but that’s a lie, as in reality, f/1.5 is actually larger than f/2.4.
So, how does this translate to the overall image quality coming out of the phone?
Well, the thing is, first of all, cameras in general are able to produce pictures with the use of light, meaning that they need all the light they could get in order to produce a photograph.
But when this light gets too much, it might make the image become overly exposed and overly bright, and again if there is not enough light, the image might become underexposed, dark, and lose details.
So, the aperture helps to create a balance between these two by allowing the required quantity of light to get to the camera sensor in order to produce the perfect photograph.
So, what is then a variable aperture?
Simple, a variable aperture is an aperture than can manually or automatically switch between two or more f-stops, and in the case of the coming Huawei Mate 50 phones, they’re rumored to be able to switch between f/1.4 and f/4.
So, what this means is that, in an overly bright scene, for instance, when shooting on a very sunny day, you can dial it down to f/4., and at night when shooting with limited light available, you can dial it up to f/1.4 so the camera sensor can get as much light as it could.
Moving further, the Huawei Mate 50 Pro is rumored to come with a 50MP main (IMX766, 1/1.5”), 13MP ultra-wide (IMX688), 40MP black and white (IMX600), and a 64MP 3.5x periscope (OV64B, 1/2”) cameras.
The cameras will rely on Huawei’s in-house XMAGE technology for image processing, which will include a HiSilicon NPU, and the phones are expected to use 4G versions of Qualcomm’s latest flagship chipsets, presumably the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.
So, until then, kindly take everything written here with a pinch of salt as there’s every possibility for things to change, and I’ll see y’all tomorrow, #peace out.
