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by SSLy 1236 days ago
>camera manufacturers simply don’t have the same compute available.

what forbids them from buying the competitive SoCs from Qualcomm? Pride?

5 comments

They would have to rewrite entirely their software. There had been some attemps to use these Qualcomm processors in cameras (the Yi M1 for example) and the result was terrible, the autofocus specially.
The much larger sensors on a dedicated camera take longer to read out / have physical shutters / are very power hungry, so doing bursts is just a worse tradeoff on a dedicated camera than on a phone.

Also, the camera market is much smaller than the phone market. Also, most camera companies are Japanese and Japanese companies are generally speaking not as good at software as they could be. (Though this is getting less true.)

Power consumption is the main issue.

Software bloat is another. Current digital cameras start up and are ready to shoot almost instantly.

But it takes a while for a phone to boot up.

Photographers don't want that.

They don't really even have to do that, they could use the iPhone soc, but the pairing between the phone and the cameras it's not optimal.
Huge amounts of power and data - the power cost of sending 48MP over a PCB vs. over wifi is 12 orders of magnitude. 40pJ Vs . 2.5J !!!!
i think the battery consumption is also quite bad.