The Chinese manufacturer Huawei is developing a camera with a variable aperture, which will allow us to change the depth of field and the exposure.
Photography has become a vital aspect in the smartphone industry; It seems that if a manufacturer does not partner with famous brands or include at least three lenses, it is doing something wrong. Of course, the quality of the photos we take depends on many more factors.
It does not seem that this trend is going to slow down, based on the latest innovations registered by companies such as Oppo, which recently introduced a continuous zoom for smartphones that will allow you to change the magnification level without having to change the lens. As revealed by LetsGoDitigal , Huawei does not want to be left behind, being already one of the references when it comes to mobile telephony with models such as the recent Huawei P50.
Its new innovation, according to a patent published this August, is a variable aperture camera lens. In other words, it is capable of opening and closing to vary the amount of light entering the sensor, moving the diaphragm blades according to automatic settings or user action. As a result, we could control both exposure and depth of field, although hopefully that’s only possible in “Pro” mode, and Huawei’s algorithms do much of the work normally.
The wider the aperture, the more light enters and therefore we can take better photos in twilight or dusk; but that also produces a blurry effect on the backgrounds, and we could cause an overexposure problem, ‘whitening’ the image if there is too much light.
In most modern mobiles, this is a problem because the aperture is fixed ; therefore, the quality of our photos depends largely on whether the situation adapts to the camera of our mobile. With a variable aperture, it would be possible to get good results regardless of those details.
Huawei would not be the first to apply this technology to a mobile camera. Samsung has already done the same with the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S10, which allowed it to vary the aperture between f / 1.5 and f / 2.4, although in its case it used 8 aperture blades, while Huawei proposes 6.
The Chinese manufacturer’s proposal It is a smaller system, which uses a tiny motor to move the blades and thus obtain a reduced thickness. Technizo Concept has used this information to imagine a Huawei mobile that would use this technology, such as a possible Huawei Mate 50, which may not arrive this year.