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by frizensami 1675 days ago
High priced flagships have them but there are also a few midrange phones like the Huawei P30 Pro that have them too. The trend seems pretty positive towards more ToF sensors in phones, especially because Apple has had them for two iPhone Pros in a row now.

They're basically for augmented reality applications because they sense depth. Placing objects at the right size and scale in the augmented view is much easier and more accurate with the ToF sensors, for instance.

2 comments

Any phone that has sub 200ms focus times has to have some sort of TOF sensor, right? The Asus Zenfone 2/3 laser, the Huawei monochrome sensor on the honor series, the portrait and/or macro sensors on the Xiaomi mi note 10, whatever the original Zenfone had, and so on.

Not all of them are lasers, which might be important.

Do you know if the Pixel 6 series supports ToF?
I don't think so. There's "laser-assisted autofocus" which might be slang for an actual ToF sensor, but sometimes that's just a single laser pulse (I.e., no 2D image that we need).