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Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

On an only slightly related note, I'd be happy if the same was available on smartphones, in software: my mobile photography is of the school "take a lot and discard almost as many" and having to choose between the different lens/sensor pairs ahead of snap is entirely alien to that process. So the camera software is forever set to that main lense and all the other ones are just dead weight in my pocket (and stuff manufacturers don't allow me to not buy when I need a new phone, preferably one with a good main camera)

I think I understand that the precessor would not be able to read out the sensors at the same time, but time-multiplexed bracketing has been done before, it really should not be too hard or weird to apply that concept to multiple sensors? (some sensors with integrated memory might even be able to do concurrent capture/deferred readout?)

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This feels like the kind of thing that's so obvious it's hard to believe it isn't being pursued... Google could, for example, make a _huge_ splash with the Pixel 10 by presenting this with the option of after-the-fact optical zoom or wide angle shots, or using the multiple lenses for some fancy fusing for additional detail. And to your point, DSLRs have been doing deferred readout in the sense of storing to an on-device cache before writing out to the SD card while waiting for previous frames to complete their write ops... this same sort of concept should be able to apply here.

I don't know much more about the computational photography pipeline, but I imagine there might be some tricky bits around focusing across multiple lenses simultaneously, around managing the slight off-axis offset (though that feels more trivial nowadays), and, as you say, around reading from the sensors into memory, but then also how to practically merge or not-merge the various shots. Google already does this with stacked photos that include, say, a computationally blurred/portrait shot alongside the primary sensor capture before that processing was done, so the bones are there for something similar... but to really take advantage of it would likely require some more work.

But this is all by way of saying, this would be really really cool and would open up a lot of potential opportunities.

> Google could, for example, make a _huge_ splash with the Pixel 10 by presenting this with the option of after-the-fact optical zoom...

Pardon my ignorance, but isn't this just an inferior version of after-the-fact photo capture?

On a serious note, what do you really mean by this? I have trouble imagining how that would work.

The biggest issue with doing this, for most people, is that now each of your photos is 3x time the size and they need to spend more on their phones and/or cloud storage.

What we really need is a better way of paring down the N photos you take of a given subject into the one or two ideal lens*adjustments*cropping tuples.

I’m imagining you open a “photo session” when you open the camera, and all photos taken in that session are grouped together. Later, you can go into each session and some AI or whatever spits out a handful of top edits for you to consider, and you delete the rest.

Use case is for taking photos with children or another animals where you need approx 50 photos to get one where they’re looking at the camera with their eyes open and a smile, then today you need to manually perform some atrocious O(N*K) procedure to get the best K of the N photos.

Even a simple "A vs B" selection process would be an improvement to what most of what we spray'n'pray photographers currently use. It's been forever on my list of mobile apps I might want to write (I expect that similar things exists, but I also kind of expect that they are all filled with other features that I really would not want to have)

What if you make an AVIF image sequence, with the zoomed photo followed by the wide angle photo? Presumably AV1 is smart enough to compress the second based on the first.

iPhones can do this. They support taking photos simultaneously from the two or three cameras on the back; the cameras are hardware-synchronized and automatically match their settings to provide similar outputs. The catch is you need a third-party app to access it, and you'll end up with two or three separate photos per shot which you'll have to manage yourself. You also won't get manual controls over white balance, focus, or ISO, and you can't shoot in RAW or ProRAW.

There are probably a good number of camera apps that support this mode; two I know of are ProCam 8 and Camera M.

If the Light L16 https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/10/17218758/l... hadn't failed, you might have seen this (as the "weaker but still useful" version of the tech spread down-market.)

But I'm not sure what you mean by "choosing lens/sensor pairs" - do any modern phones even expose that? The samsung version is just "you zoom. Occasionally the field of view jumps awkwardly sideways because it switched lenses."

But zooming is lens selection (if implemented like that). I don't want to be bothered with zooming. A full frame of each sensor, pick and crop later.

I want to point the side with the cameras at whatever I want to take a picture of, hit the release button and move on. All that careful framing? That might be enjoyable to do ahead of time if you take pictures of carefully arranged flower bouquets or something like that, but that's very far from many of the use cases of the always-at-hand camera. Give me ultrawide, tele and whatever exists in between at a single press of a button and let me go back to whatever I was doing while the desire to persist a visual situation came up. Memory is cheap, selection is a chore but one that can be done time-shifted. I'm not suggesting to take away your ahead of time framing, I'm just longing for an option to simply read them all (sequentially, if necessary). Perhaps even throw in a readout of the selfie-cam for good measure.

There are different depth of field and focus point. In modern system do you want left eye or right eye focus of the subject the camera choose. Hence whilst one can have a wide angle lens that can roughly good coverage of the scene, tele even normal lens cannot act like what you fancy about if you look carefully.

And this I just have a photo by the camera for the camera with the camera is a market taken over by phone now.

But for photography taken by camera, it is specialised these days. You want a picture you choose, you frame, background blur, for the first photo left ey of the subject of the far right corner and the second is on the right eye of … etc. You choose. And that requires choice by the camera man, or person, not the camera.

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