Insta360's Ace Pro combines Leica engineering with computational photography
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
https://www.trustedreviews.com/explainer/what-is-1-inch-came....
I hope these class of devices can start integrating better with phones. The screens on these things aren't big enough for comfortably complex & advanced photo-nerdery, but even my old Zcam E1 (Kickstarter 4/3" (aka MFT) 4k action camera from 2p25) has a pretty ok wifi app where I can compose shots well & relatively quickly change settings. It's also great for composing group photos. These are amazing sensor packages, and are held back by how they are marketed & targetted, but eventually those designations are going to start crumbling some, and that should be amazing.
If these devices did expose some kind of more prosumer interface I could easily see them migrating from action cams to something like camera replacements. Insta360 has already done great with cameras & optics. Their One RS platform allowing the lens + sensor to swap out, and it's easy for me to imagine expanding the lineup from mostly wide angle ish prime lenses to also incclude some optical zoom or long focal length primes.
Ideally phones would also integrate themselves well too. I can plug a USB camera (I've had much more hit & miss situation with microphones weirdly) into most Android phones and have it work (alas notably Chrome often doesn't pick up the device frustratingly!!); handy for conference rooms or desks with good fixed infrastructure. But so far we still don't good standards based ways to do this kind of thing over wifi. It'd be fun to swing for the fences & see someone bake Media-over-QUIC or something bleeding Edge into a device, but even an rtsp streamer & Android support as a sink would enable fun weird interesting advanced uses galore.
Too bad, even for traditional action camera use cases 360 cameras have several advantages, but I guess the higher cost limits the market.
I love my One RS 1" (the non-360 Leica lens). The only caveats are that it's really hard to search for the accessories, and doesn't have a dive case.
I just listened to a few reviews of the Panasonic G9ii and it has computational photography features too, but that’s not to skimp on optics (very good lenses are available) it is again to get the maximum performance out of the system.
Why would you not spend some compute power to make your camera hardware more versatile?
I want the optics and processing to produce the most detailed, widest-gamut, highest-dynamic-range image that is possible, give it to me in a raw form, and then allow me to shape the image to whatever I need it to be
AI R&D takes away from optics/processing R&D, and those are what should be getting 100% of the R&D effort
> AI R&D takes away from optics/processing R&D
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I don't know what the engineering structure of the company is like.
I just disagree that the goal or purpose of computational photography is to skimp in other areas. The G9ii has a 25 megapixel micro four thirds image sensor but it can take 100 megapixel photos using an automated process where the image sensor is physically shifted around (thanks to in-body image stabilization capability) while multiple exposures are taken and then combined using computational techniques.
But that is certainly not as an alternative to producing a 100 megapixel micro four thirds sensor, which would have very small pixels and thus poor noise performance among other things. On the G9ii, the computational features purely extend the function of the system. You could argue maybe they would have gone to 30 megapixels or 35 if they did not have this alternative, I don't know.
If you want the absolute best possibly image quality, you simply will not want a pocket action camera. But all cameras will adopt more computational techniques and I don't think it's correct to say they are doing so because they wanted to skimp in other areas. Action cameras already skimp on lens quality to get a pocket form factor, not because they are adding AI. Additionally on cell phones, the form factor has always been the reason for low quality lenses and small sensor size. AI clearly has a place in extending the capability of a camera system with other physical constraints. Perhaps some companies will use that as an excuse to use cheaper optics than what is possible, but I would argue we cannot infer they have done that simply because computational photography is used. Computers are simply cheap and these techniques will get added because they have zero or very low BOM cost impact.
Again, we can figure out better optics and processing without having to computationally invent details that didn't exist.
We are seeing the same thing happen with DLSS, new games are coming out with frankly unacceptable performance and the cop-out is "just use DLSS"
I find it irritating to talk to people who speak this way, just FYI.
> Again, we can figure out better optics and processing without having to computationally invent details that didn't exist.
Computational photography is not just inventing details that didn't exist. The 100 megapixel mode on the G9ii physically shifts the sensor a minute amount to collect details which are there but fell in between the pixels on other exposures, and then it computationally combines multiple frames to reconstruct the details. I want this functionality because I print my photos in large format and the printer is capable of reproducing MUCH more detail than my current 21Mp camera can.
> we can figure out better optics and processing
There will always be a limit to optics, and "processing" is always going to be used. Whether a marketing department calls that processing AI or not doesn't matter. Every camera has a manufacturing budget to fit a target price, and that will always mean trade offs and choices made in lens quality. Spending on "processing" will always be part of the calculation. Even on a high end micro four thirds camera, there is just a limit to what you can do even with expensive lenses, and computational techniques are going to be used to optionally extend the capability.
I've done large format printing, you need at least those things in place for the print to come out accurately.
> I find it irritating to talk to people who speak this way, just FYI.
I find the gentrified, milquetoast corpo-speak that seems to be the norm here to be just as annoying
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgT-ZNTaRCA&t=687s
One Insta360 Ace Pro review on YouTube compared the Ace Pro and GoPro Hero 12 and the Ace Pro kept going for at least 1h15mins while the Hero 12 shutdown after less than 30mins.
So it makes photos showing people with six fingers per hand?
>Using an onboard 5nm AI chip, the Ace and Ace Pro cameras use a custom-trained AI neural network to denoise the footage for a clearer image in real time, Insta360 claims.
ML denoisers are pretty useful in high-quality photography if done right. Photographers were initially skeptical at large, but quickly accepted it, as products from Topaz, DxO, and alike were giving excellent results. You are extremely unlikely to stumble upon any invented detail in a denoiser like this.
If I don’t let it go crazy and keep it subtle, the results are incredible. Tbh for my camera (EOS R10) and DxO, low dynamic range, not noise, is now the limiting factor for high ISO photos.