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Apple Wants to Take Camera Sensor Design In-House: Report

7 points by mikece 3y ago

mikece 3y ago
I would be far happier with being able to tether my Canon R6 to my iPhone so that RAW images are saved to the SDXC card on the camera and JPG images are saved to my phone's photos collection. Heck, there are a lot of cases where it would be useful to be able to use a modern mirrorless camera as the image capture device for an app (taking advantage of macro or telephoto lenses, full-frame sensors, etc.) rather than the limited image sensor in an iPhone.
- k310 3y ago
  I don't know about Canon, but Nikon offers a SnapBridge app that connects the camera with a phone (bluetooth and wireless). I never bothered because it uses battery to do this. (I never measured) Would a wireless SD card do what you want? Beats the heck out of a lightning or usb-c SD card adapter (I do that, too, but mainly to the computer. Phone memory is expensive, fixed in size and requires cleanup when it fills. ) In fact, "system data" was using all of my free storage and after all other attempts, I ended up backing up the phone, erasing and restoring the phone to clear it.
wmf 3y ago
This is perfect for Apple since good image sensor design requires a small highly-skilled team. It's very different from, say, cellular modems.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Is that really true? Isn't Sony I&SS a pretty huge division, with over 10'000 employees? From my understanding, sensor development is highly tied into process development, unless you do fairly minor implementation requests to Sony. But so far, neither Canon nor Nikon have been especially successful speccing out significantly better sensors from Sony than are available to anyone else (and Canon's in-house sensors are pretty much uniformly inferior). But who knows, maybe Apple can pull off something neither Nikon, Canon nor Samsung have been able to.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Historically, small fabless companies like FillFactory and Red have been able to do pretty well. Apple's goal may be reducing Sony's margin rather than trying to beat their quality.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      Source on RED making their own sensors? Word on the street is that they essentially use minor tweaks of Canon sensors nowadays (the Komodo sensor is suspiciously similar to an APS-C crop of the R5, and of course the highly proprietary RF mount is a strong hint to close ties). FillFactory was successful, but that was 20 years ago. Sony is really dominant now in a way it never was before.
- SavageBeast 3y ago
  Someone on the Qualcomm modem team should comment here - No clue about making image sensors but having spent some significant time with just such an engineer, the modem team people face some fairly absurd challenges. Their world seemed to be a vast collection of edge/corner/special cases to me. But they were all real world cases that were liable to happen all the time. When is a good 3g signal superior to a bad 4g signal? On and on and on. Making an image sensor at least naively seems like a smaller problem surface.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
It's Tim Cook, Apple's supply-chain guy at work. Slowly moving up the food-chain to in-source the most expensive items on the BOM and bring down costs, now that they achieved the scale for it. First the SoC, then the modem, then the sensor.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  An Apple part potentially brings down costs, but Apple Silicon wasn’t primarily about bringing down costs, and it’s unlikely to be the focus of this exercise either IMHO. There’s a huge opportunity to differentiate in terms of a hardware + software system, where right now Apple can mostly only innovate in software. This becomes even more important in the context of HMDs.

7 points by mikece 3y ago

I would be far happier with being able to tether my Canon R6 to my iPhone so that RAW images are saved to the SDXC card on the camera and JPG images are saved to my phone's photos collection. Heck, there are a lot of cases where it would be useful to be able to use a modern mirrorless camera as the image capture device for an app (taking advantage of macro or telephoto lenses, full-frame sensors, etc.) rather than the limited image sensor in an iPhone.

k310 3y ago
I don't know about Canon, but Nikon offers a SnapBridge app that connects the camera with a phone (bluetooth and wireless). I never bothered because it uses battery to do this. (I never measured) Would a wireless SD card do what you want? Beats the heck out of a lightning or usb-c SD card adapter (I do that, too, but mainly to the computer. Phone memory is expensive, fixed in size and requires cleanup when it fills. ) In fact, "system data" was using all of my free storage and after all other attempts, I ended up backing up the phone, erasing and restoring the phone to clear it.

wmf 3y ago

This is perfect for Apple since good image sensor design requires a small highly-skilled team. It's very different from, say, cellular modems.

sudosysgen 3y ago
Is that really true? Isn't Sony I&SS a pretty huge division, with over 10'000 employees? From my understanding, sensor development is highly tied into process development, unless you do fairly minor implementation requests to Sony. But so far, neither Canon nor Nikon have been especially successful speccing out significantly better sensors from Sony than are available to anyone else (and Canon's in-house sensors are pretty much uniformly inferior). But who knows, maybe Apple can pull off something neither Nikon, Canon nor Samsung have been able to.
- wmf 3y ago
  Historically, small fabless companies like FillFactory and Red have been able to do pretty well. Apple's goal may be reducing Sony's margin rather than trying to beat their quality.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Source on RED making their own sensors? Word on the street is that they essentially use minor tweaks of Canon sensors nowadays (the Komodo sensor is suspiciously similar to an APS-C crop of the R5, and of course the highly proprietary RF mount is a strong hint to close ties). FillFactory was successful, but that was 20 years ago. Sony is really dominant now in a way it never was before.
SavageBeast 3y ago
Someone on the Qualcomm modem team should comment here - No clue about making image sensors but having spent some significant time with just such an engineer, the modem team people face some fairly absurd challenges. Their world seemed to be a vast collection of edge/corner/special cases to me. But they were all real world cases that were liable to happen all the time. When is a good 3g signal superior to a bad 4g signal? On and on and on. Making an image sensor at least naively seems like a smaller problem surface.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

It's Tim Cook, Apple's supply-chain guy at work. Slowly moving up the food-chain to in-source the most expensive items on the BOM and bring down costs, now that they achieved the scale for it. First the SoC, then the modem, then the sensor.

CharlesW 3y ago
An Apple part potentially brings down costs, but Apple Silicon wasn’t primarily about bringing down costs, and it’s unlikely to be the focus of this exercise either IMHO. There’s a huge opportunity to differentiate in terms of a hardware + software system, where right now Apple can mostly only innovate in software. This becomes even more important in the context of HMDs.