According to a report picked up by MacRumors, this year’s iPhone 12 will feature new “high-end” lenses manufactured by the Taiwanese company, Largan Precision. The news comes from Ming-Chi Kuo, a renowned analyst at TF International Securities who, according to the report, expects the new lenses to arrive at Apple somewhat later than usual from-mid July.
Kuo doesn’t go into detail about the new lenses or their specifications, but making specific note of their high-end formulation strongly suggests something of an upgrade over their iPhone 11 counterparts.
Of course, the iPhone 11’s lenses are already pretty good to begin with, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement both in terms of both their quality and their capabilities.
More important, however, is the fact that just because a lens works brilliantly on the iPhone 11 doesn’t mean it will be good enough for the iPhone 12. High-end lenses are carefully engineered to pair up with high-end cameras and sensors. If Apple has invested in upgraded lenses, then it’s safe to assume that the underlying camera hardware is going to be good enough to make use of them.
A great many factors could single out a lens as high-end, including sharpness, brightness, control of flare, contrast, vignetting and distortion, to name but a few. New Ultra-wide or ultra-telephoto lenses would also qualify as high-end optics due to the added difficulty in creating lenses at the extreme ends of the camera’s zoom range. Furthermore, any larger imaging sensors featured in the iPhone 12 would require correspondingly larger and more expensive ‘high-end’ lenses to go with them. This means the iPhone 12 camera must itself be getting a significant high-end upgrade.
All will be revealed just a few months from now, in what is shaping up to be one of Apple’s most exciting launches yet.
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I’ve been working as a technology journalist since the early nineties. My passion is photography and the ever-changing hardware and software that we use to create it, be it traditional cameras and Photoshop or smartphones and tablets with their numerous apps. I have also worked extensively on computing titles such as PC Magazine and Personal Computer World and managed the PCW hardware testing labs. This has seen me testing and reviewing all manner of technologies in print and on line. I take on both written and photographic assignments and you can get in touch with questions, tips or pitches via email. Find me on Instagram @paul_monckton.
Source: https://www.forbes.com
