Reliable analyst (if there is such a thing) Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities sent an interesting report to clients, a copy of which was obtained by AppleInsider.
In it, he predicts that a new, premium edition of Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus will be outfitted with a dual-lens system with optical image stabilization and optical zoom, realized through technology Apple obtained from last year’s acquisition of Israeli camera technology company LinX Imaging.
By capturing two sets of image data and combining them into a single image, the handset should boost the quality of photographs. The 2-3x optical zoom, mentioned in the report, would be a first for the iPhone. The analyst expects about 30 percent of iPhone 7 shipments to include dual lenses, with Sony expected to be the main supplier of the CMOS sensor.
The report predicts that this ultra-premium edition of the iPhone 7 Plus will be introduced alongside the 4.7-inch iPhone 7 and 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus, neither of which will make use of the dual-lens configuration. In other words, the iPhone 7 Plus should come in single-camera and dual-camera versions.
LinX technology, now owned by Apple, allows for significantly smaller cameras with DSLR-class performance through the use of multiple lenses.
“The engineers at LinX have solved all problems associated with combining multiple images captured from different points in space such as registration errors and occlusion related artifacts which are seen on competing technologies,” according to a LinX press release last year.
In addition, Linx technology could also allow the next iPhone’s iSight camera to capture depth information that could be used for 3D image reconstruction.
Source: AppleInsider