Vivo has been working behind the scenes on the development of a new chip for smartphones and other innovations in the field of photography: here’s what they are and what they are
Over 300 people engaged in research and development for 24 months, two years. That’s how much it cost to Vivo the development of a new chip for smartphones that the Chinese company has made official in the last hours, a product that should ensure a considerable leap in quality in terms of photography as well as give the manufacturer a certain independence.
These days in fact you can never say, and it seems that the Huawei affair with the trade block imposed by the United States has taught a lot. More and more companies are trying to “set up their own business”, especially when the technology and the training of men available allow them to do so. So Vivo has worked hard to develop in house what is its first imaging chip, in fact an ISP, called Vivo V1. From the novelty, the company is sure to reap big benefits, both in terms of cost savings (which helps it offer more affordable smartphones) and improvements to photo and video quality.
The new Vivo V1 chip for photos
The Vivo V1 chip is the result of the company’s R&D efforts, but also of its collaboration with the likes of Zeiss, which assisted Vivo with the ISP and improved smartphone optics.
Because it is an in-house developed component, the V1 chip was developed by pursuing the aspects that Vivo deemed priority to improve the performance of its smartphones. The company says V1 has negligible response time (or latency) and low power consumption with high computing power despite the chip theoretically not needing it, operating in close cooperation with the smartphone’s main chip.
Vivo V1 has so much power and speed that it can perform parallel processing of GPU and DSP data if needed, which offers tangible benefits in terms of increasing overall efficiency, according to the company. In most cases, manufacturers rely on ISPs such as the Vivo V1 that whoever builds the main chip of the smartphone – Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, etc. – integrates into the same, and the limitation of this solution is that the ISP cannot be customized according to the needs of the individual manufacturer: that’s just the way it is and you have to adapt.
In this way, however, Vivo overcomes this limitation, developing its ISP based on what it has deemed most appropriate. It’s a novelty that could potentially bring important improvements to the shooting quality of Vivo smartphones, so there’s a lot of curiosity to see it at work.
The other novelties in the photo and video theme
During the same event in which the V1 chip came to light, Vivo announced other news inherent to the photographic field for smartphones.
Glass lenses developed alongside Zeiss with very low dispersion and high transmittance that can reduce chromatic dispersion, so called lens flare with results comparable to those of professional cameras, multi-layer coatings for lenses in order to eliminate reflections and other imperfections that debase photos, especially those taken in difficult lighting conditions.
All this will be implemented in the next generation of Vivo smartphones.