Cameras in Everything – update from Samsung

 As the decade begins, there is a pervasive presence of video being captured and broadcast. The most popular broadcast medium is the internet for this content, and the video is being captured on an increasing variety of devices. In an opportunity to review the current status and trends of the solid state imagers, I had a discussion with the product team at Samsung SSI Imaging Solutions.

There are two primary markets for the imaging systems – photo primary products (still and video cameras) and photo secondary products ( displays, handsets, and computing devices that have integrated still/video capture). The highest volume of these markets is handsets. The trend is to move form the current state of 1.3Mpixel imagers to the 5M and 8M range. Due to the fixed size limitation of these product in the handsets, the tradeoff to these higher resolutions is low light performance and sensitivity. As the pixel size decreases, due to a fix chip size and increased number of elements, the number of photons captured the by the cells decreases for the same frame rate due to the reduced size. For this reason, the industry is starting to settle out on the 5M pixel resolution, as it is a good compromise without requiring additional LEDs for a “solid state flash” lighting solution.

The lower resolution cameras are still present in the handset space and are growing. In the Asia/Korean/Japanese markets, the 3G/4G phones currently sport a second front facing lower resolution (VGA or 1.3M) camera as has been recently introduced to the US markets through the Apple iPhone 4. In the standalone SLR camera marketplace, the resolution is being improved and there are now commercial imagers in the 12M-14M pixel range.

This incorporation of the multiple cameras in the system, and the increased resolution, the focus is now shifting to the image signal processing rather than pushing the pixel count up. Since the mobile handsets have some power limitations, the plan is not to pass the photo data to the internet via wifeless or 3G, rather the data is encoded to a video format and stored on the local flash memory/ This memory is then transferred to a computer via the removable memory card or via a powered connection.

Moving on from the handsets, there is also a growing demand for displays with integrated imagers. These displays are in stand alone monitors, next generation TVs and also mobile computing devices (laptops/netbooks/tablet displays). These are targeted towards video conferencing and video rather than still capture. The current mainstream imager is a VGA level with large pixels to operate in low light conditions. The trend is to move up to 720p capture in a 16:9 image format. This can be done with existing 1.3M sensors which will support the high 30FPS frame rate. At this time there is little to no demand for the 1080p products, as the raw data generated is very large to transfer in a streaming or real time applications.

PC