Sensors

If you've ever used your cellphone or a tiny compact to try and capture bright light and deep shadows while outdoors, you know exactly how poor the dynamic range of a small sensor can be. The traditional way around this is either using some sort of HDR technology, or just upping into bigger sensor. But now a company is claiming that it can massively improve the way these small sensors handle dynamic range, through a technique called "binary pixels".

Chipworks has stripped an iPhone 5 down to its constituent parts, and revealed the source behind the camera sensors in the new device. Since the iPhone 5 has two cameras — an 8-megapixel one on the back, and a 1.2-megapixel version facing front, two sensors and lenses are required.

Yoshiyuki Inoue, Panasonic's Senior Engineering Planner talked to TechRadar about the wildly popular LX line of high-end compacts, and teasted that we might soon be seeing a much larger sensor in the cameras. He talked to them about how the LX5 hasn't been as received as well as its predecessor, the LX3, and that rather than immediately release a new camera, they decided to tweak it with firmware before going for a hardware upgrade.