The growing image-processor unpleasantness

Posted Aug 19, 2022 8:17 UTC (Fri) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290)
In reply to: The growing image-processor unpleasantness by pabs
Parent article: The growing image-processor unpleasantness

Patents are possibly involved, but it's mostly because SoC vendors consider the camera algorithm to be of very high added value, and a key differentiator to compete with each other. Investments in this area are usually substantial. Whether quality of the end result justifies this or not is of course sometimes debatable :-)

The growing image-processor unpleasantness

Posted Aug 19, 2022 10:34 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Not just SoC vendors. If you look on quality comparisons for different phones you'll see there are substantial difference in quality even if they use the same sensor and SOC.

So yeah, it's where people actively don't want you to know what they are doing.

The growing image-processor unpleasantness

Posted Aug 19, 2022 11:24 UTC (Fri) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290) [Link]

While the ISP hardware plays a big role in image quality, the end result also heavily depends on the camera sensor, as well as the tuning process. The ISP control algorithms (the closed source part running in userspace) are also crucial, but OEMs have less control over that, except when they can provide enough monetary incentive to the SoC vendor to improve the algorithms for a specific product. All this can explain the variations you see between devices that use the same SoC.