Qualcomm made a big announcement this week. The company just announced its new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, and even if you don’t particularly follow the world of smartphone chipsets, this is something worth getting excited about. Qualcomm promises significant performance and efficiency improvements over last year’s already impressive Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This is great news for next year’s lineup of flagship Android smartphones.
But there’s more to Snapdragon 8 Elite than just more power and efficiency. It also has the potential to significantly change the way you use your phone’s camera. Why? To better understand myself, I spoke with Judd Heap, Qualcomm’s vice president of product management, and he got even more excited about the immediate (and distant) future of smartphone cameras. It has become.
Important camera upgrades behind the scenes
A large part of the Snapdragon 8 Elite is what Qualcomm calls an “AI ISP.” An ISP (Image Signal Processor) is a standard component in all smartphone chips, including Snapdragon chips, and powers image processing in your phone’s camera. In the case of Snapdragon 8 Elite, the AI ISP is much more tightly coupled to the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) than in other Snapdragon chips before it. This may sound jargon-heavy, but essentially it means that critical camera features need to work much better than before.
What camera features does it have? One of the most interesting is how AI ISP improves auto white balance. Why is it a big deal? “One of the things that cameras often make mistakes based on very complex lighting is if you’re outside in a parking lot and the lights are very orange, it’s going to be indoors and outdoors at the same time. Things like lighting,” Heap said. “That can easily mess up skin tones. It’s a failure of automatic white balance.”
This new ISP has a tighter connection to the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s NPU, allowing it to “produce the right skin tones no matter the lighting conditions.” What’s really interesting is that these automatic white balance improvements don’t just happen after you take the photo. These enhancements are visible in real time through the viewfinder, so you get exactly what you see when you take the photo.
Another promising change is that the new ISPs consume less power. “The new architecture also lowers ISP power consumption,” says Heape. “That means for very interesting use cases like 4K 60 fps HDR video recording, the ISP consumes 25% less power, which means fewer thermal issues when shooting video.” When it comes to video. , the new ISP also improves Qualcomm’s “temporal noise filter.” Because these filters look at more video frames than before, “the video you shoot will be much cleaner than before. It was good before, but it’s even better now.”
Are these fancy AI camera features like Google Pixel 9’s Add Me mode or Galaxy AI’s slew of camera/photo editing tools? No. But can they legitimately deliver better photos and videos on any Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered phone? Absolutely. And this is the kind of AI camera enhancement I’d like to see more of.
What does the future hold for smartphone cameras?
Beyond the immediate enhancements with Snapdragon 8 Elite, Heap wonders what the larger future holds for smartphone cameras and, as someone who works closely with the field at Qualcomm, what more he hopes to see. We’ve shared some insight into how it works.
While improving auto white balance and seeing those improvements in real time through the viewfinder, Heap admitted: What you see and what you get is really important. It gives confidence to photographers…OEMs need to focus on that. ”
Heap was also asked about his “dream application” for Qualcomm’s ISP advancements and what he’s most excited about the smartphone company leveraging in the coming years, and I found his answer fascinating. I thought. As he explained, Heape is interested in “reducing the cost and complexity of camera systems.”
“In some cases, I think you can get away with two cameras instead of three, which saves processing and power. We also use AI to get super resolution, and we use AI to do things in low light. When asked about leveraging AI to make the smartphone camera experience even better than it currently is, Heap said he would like to see a world where cameras can recognize you. .
“The camera gets to know you, it gets to know your tastes, it gets to know the edits you tend to do, the shots you like to take… It basically trains the camera to know what kind of shots you like, how to compose it, and what kind of shots you like. I think that’s where we need to go next… so to speak. It’s like installing a Copilot PC for your camera.”
As someone who hasn’t been too impressed with existing AI camera tools, Heape’s ideal camera future is the one we’re heading towards, where AI works in the background and takes better photos and images without you even thinking about it. I really hope this is the future where we provide video. . I don’t really care (or want) AI features that turn my photos into something that isn’t real. I want people to take the best pictures possible with their phones without thinking too much. Talking to Heape, it seems like that’s the future he wants to see.
i think we are moving in the right direction
Ever since smartphone brands and chip manufacturers started collaborating, All included Over the past few years, I’ve found it hard to get really excited about almost anything when it comes to AI. I’ve seen some cool tech demos and some cool features here and there, but I felt like nothing really changes the way we use our phones, especially when it comes to cameras.
It remains to be seen how well the Snapdragon 8 Elite and its new ISP will actually perform in the real world, and whether the future of cameras Heape describes is actually what we’re aiming for. But I admit that I’m genuinely interested. And I have hope for all of that. We strongly believe that the best way to use AI is to let it work in the background, allowing you to use your phone as normal, and even better. Always give better white balance and video recording than unstable image generation tools. I really feel like that’s the direction Qualcomm is heading in, and if that’s the future we can expect for smartphone cameras, then please join us.
