A startup called Spectricity hopes its special purpose camera that captures 16 different colors will mean your future phone will be able to handle the subtleties of real-world color more capably.
The company has developed a very compact form of what’s called a multispectral camera, a module that captures many more frequencies of light than the red, green and blue of traditional digital cameras. By marrying its multispectral image data with the photo taken by a traditional camera, the system can better navigate tricky lighting situations, improve skin tones in photos, boost apps for makeup choices and dermatology diagnoses, and help with online purchases where accurate color matters.
“Smartphones are colorblind. It’s a problem all smartphone makers are trying to solve,” said Chief Executive Vincent Mouret, who leads the 35-person spinoff from Imec, a prominent chip research and development center in Belgium. He spoke from the CES 2024 show, where Spectricity is showing off its S1 multispectral camera, now squeezed down to fit in a phone.
Indeed, the company has at least three customers that he expects will include Spectricity’s camera in 2025 phones.
Cameras are arguably the highest profile aspect of any new phone and the main reason many of us upgrade. They’re getting steadily better as phone makers increase sensor size, add new cameras for ultrawide and telephoto perspectives and improve computational photography software that milks better shots out of small image sensors. Phone makers are desperate for an edge that helps them stand out over rivals.
It’s not clear just how often Spectricity’s technology would improve a photo. Not every shot is complicated by unusual lighting or difficult situations, like mixed lighting with both warmer-toned indoor lights and cooler outdoor sunshine.
But color problems can be significant, as evidenced by the effort companies like Google and Apple are investing into truer rendering of skin tones, especially for people of color.
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