Meet Real Tone’s hardware-level equivalent
Smartphone cameras are all about convenience and ease of use, but despite improving by leaps and bounds in recent years, most shooters are still imperfect. One of the most prominent issues remains dialing the white balance just right. Image processing software funnel solutions exist but a hardware-level solution would be more desirable. CES 2023 has shown us all sorts of exciting tech, including a new multispectral image sensor from Spectricity that promises to fix the issue for good.
Issues with white balance show up as cooler or warmer tones in images, often affecting the skin tones of human subjects, the color of water, and what artificial indoor lighting looks like. Google has introduced Real Tone on Pixel phones to combat this — specifically when dealing with darker skin tone — but Spectricity’s new S1 image sensor (via The Verge) uses the visible spectrum of light and looks beyond it, into the near-infrared range.
Source: Spectricity
The S1 can be used alongside any existing smartphone image sensor, improving white balance in the latter’s results. Conventional image sensors only gather visible light and convert into pixels composed of varying levels of red, green, and blue (RGB), creating different colors. Spectricity says the S1 can capture correct color and help produce true-to-life images in challenging lighting conditions.
The company’s chief technical officer, Jonathan Borremans, says the S1 is a true technological breakthrough. In this week’s announcement, he claims that the company’s sensor “uses richer spectral signature data, resulting in much higher color fidelity in your pictures. We’re confident that spectral imaging will become essential in all devices including a camera.”
Spectricity CEO Vincent Mouret, meanwhile, explains that this new spectral imager is affordable, and we can hope to see consumer-ready smartphones packing this sensor launching in 2024. He believes that “all smartphones” will include Spectricity tech in the near future. Currently, the company is providing evaluation kits for OEMs selling a large volume of devices.
If you cannot wait for this auxiliary sensor to make its way to your future smartphone, we suggest you check out some of the best image editing apps available. Although tweaking the white balance after we have captured a shot isn’t the perfect situation, minor adjustments can go a long way.
