Another innovative company has given up on revolutionizing mobile photography

guest · Jun 13, 2020

Another innovative company has given up on revolutionizing mobile photography
Light crammed a ton of cameras onto a single device
June 12, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/12/21289574/light-camera-company-exits-smartphone-business

Light, the company behind the Nokia 9’s unique array of five rear cameras, has given up on its unconventional effort to revolutionize the cameras in our pockets. In a statement to Android Authority, Light said it’s “no longer operating in the smartphone industry.”

Light set out to overcome the limitations of small camera sensors — like those in our phones — by cramming a ton of cameras (each with different focal lengths) onto one device and combining the data from all those modules. Its proof of concept for this was the $2,000 L16 camera. In a review, my colleague Sean O’Kane credited the L16 as being an engineering marvel and said it indeed delivered better image quality than most mobile devices.
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But by the time the Nokia 9 launched, other phone makers like Google, Apple, and Huawei had already found their own magic with smart HDR and stitching multiple images into a single shot.
More recently, larger-sized sensors are finding their way into smartphones to help further boost image quality and detail.

That’s led Light to follow in the footsteps of Lytro — another company that once touted groundbreaking photography tech — and significantly change course.
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ArsTechnica: Light, the company behind the Nokia 9 camera, quits the smartphone business

The problem with Light's approach is that it asked for a 5x increase in camera cost and complexity without offering many benefits. Smartphones already do "temporal" image stacking with a single lens—you might tap the shutter button once, but under the hood, multiple photos are taken, one after another, and stitched together.
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