The OIS Opportunity

The OIS Opportunity

Smartphones have now become the main photography device for a majority of picture takers and smartphone companies are placing increasing focus on improving picture quality of smartphone cameras.  Through advances in miniaturization, design, and mass production cost, OIS is now making its way into smartphones.  By nature of a smartphone's size and ever shrinking thickness, sensors and lenses must be kept small.  These tiny lenses and sensors with pixel sizes approaching 1 micron make low light photography very challenging as the small aperture significantly limits the amount of light that reaches the sensor.  OIS is especially beneficial to smartphone photography as it can improve the light gathering abillity by 16-32 times (4-5 stops) while maintaining clear blur-free images.  In addition to low light, OIS substantially improves video quality.  When taking videos, OIS counteracts unintended camera movement enabling smooth professional looking video taken from your handheld device. 

 

SMA OIS in Action

To demonstrate SMA OIS, we setup a phone on a shaker table pointed up at a test pattern.  We then pointed a laser beam down through the test pattern and reflected it off the phone back onto the pattern.  The red stationary dot in the video is the laser pointing down and the moving dot is the reflected beam back onto the target. This laser is used to demonstrate how much the phone is moving despite the image being stationary when OIS is on.