Track Hyper | This company actually shocks the audience with high-end imaging power?

Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street News

The imaging capabilities of Honor's high-end flagship have finally "established" themselves in 2024.

Although domestic smartphone manufacturers have fully surpassed Apple in imaging capabilities (mainly referring to still photography), Honor is an "exception," or rather, Honor's imaging capabilities are relatively weak.

However, on December 23rd, Honor successfully entered the ranks of top domestic high-end flagship imaging with the actual imaging performance of the newly released Porsche Design "Honor Magic7 RSR."

It can be said that the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design, with its outstanding imaging system, has redefined a new height for mobile imaging.

This is not an exaggeration.

From a hardware configuration perspective, the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design uses the OV50K high-end sensor as its main camera and wide-angle lens ISP, with a pixel count of 50 million (super dynamic variable eagle-eye main camera), and a sensor size of 1/1.3 inches, which is a notch higher than the OV50H sensor of the Huawei Mate 70 Pro +.

The OV50K is the world's first smartphone image sensor to use LOFIC technology, and its technical feature is essentially one: high dynamic range—15EV, which is the maximum dynamic range that the human eye can perceive, and also the upper limit of dynamic range for some DSLR cameras (such as Sony α7S III, Sony α7R IV, and EOS-1D X MARK II).

LOFIC technology was originally applied in the automotive industry's autonomous driving onboard camera systems to handle complex scenarios such as passing through tunnels and night scene lighting.

LOFIC was originally part of the TheiaCel™ technology developed by OmniVision for automotive cameras, aimed at enhancing dynamic range and eliminating LED flicker.

TheiaCel™ technology provides excellent single-exposure HDR in extreme light and dark scenes. The OV50K 50-megapixel image sensor based on TheiaCel™ technology features a pixel size of 1.2 microns and an optical format of 1/1.3 inches, with high gain and correlated multiple sampling (CMS) capabilities, achieving extreme performance in low-light conditions.

The wide-angle lens equipped on the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design also features macro capabilities: supporting a 122° ultra-wide field of view and 2.5cm super macro, easily handling both vast landscapes and the details of the microscopic world.

This new flagship model also features the industry's mainstream this year—super-sensitive periscope telephoto lens.

The most shocking move by the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design is the debut of a 200-megapixel super-sensitive periscope telephoto lens, using a 1/1.4-inch Samsung HP3 sensor, with an f/1.88 ultra-large periscope telephoto aperture, increasing light intake by a terrifying 98%, achieving super strong light sensitivity for telephoto lenses in the industry; combined with a 1G+5P floating lens group, its resolution and image purity are astonishing.

This allows users to capture clearer, brighter, and more detailed images of distant subjects, even in low-light telephoto shooting conditions, presenting excellent image quality, a more textured large aperture bokeh effect, and clearer and more practical telephoto macro performance To further enhance the long-focus shooting capabilities, the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design adopts the industry's first dual electromagnetic focusing motor, increasing the focusing thrust by 83%; combined with 1,200-point laser radar focusing detection, the tracking focus range has been increased by 120%, and the focusing accuracy has improved by 90%.

The application of this technology allows users to focus more accurately when shooting moving objects or fast-moving scenes, easily capturing exciting moments and achieving high-quality continuous shooting at 10 frames per second within the 10x focal length, breaking through the limits of long-focus resolution, significantly improving the clarity of continuous shooting compared to the previous generation.

On the software side, the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design introduces the industry's first end-cloud collaborative AI computational photography system—AI Light Control Engine.

Through this innovative system, Honor deeply integrates AI technology into various aspects of image processing: from the lens module, image sensor to image algorithms, achieving quality enhancement across the entire link.

The AI Light Control Engine optimizes photo effects for core scenes such as portraits, snapshots, and long-focus, ensuring that every photo is clear, vivid, natural, and realistic; as the first model in the industry to apply cloud-enhanced large models to mobile long-focus photography, the AI super long-focus feature of the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design, leveraging a large model with up to 12.4 billion parameters, can significantly enhance photo clarity in the 30x-100x ultra-long-focus range.

With powerful cloud computing support, the detail generation calculation for each image reaches 1.27 trillion times, making the textures, colors, and other details of distant objects more realistic; when connected to the internet, users can get instant results without needing to re-enter the gallery for cloud enhancement, greatly improving the convenience and practicality of long-focus shooting.

Additionally, with the support of end-side AI RAW large model technology, the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design can fully unleash the sensor's ultimate resolution, focusing on improving photo quality in high-magnification shooting within the 12x-30x focal length.

This technology can flexibly adapt to various self-developed image quality enhancement algorithms, based on convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks, and VIT visual attention models, systematically completing denoising, de-mosaicing, HDR recovery, tone reconstruction, and other quality enhancements, effectively improving the clarity of mid-to-high magnification photos by up to 50%.

Based on the new imaging algorithms of the AI Light Control Engine, the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design achieves an overall quality enhancement in mobile imaging.

Honor CEO Zhao Ming stated, "The future development focus of Honor imaging will take the AI route. With the support of AI technology, Honor imaging can also achieve 'the more you use it, the better it gets, the more it understands you.'"

This statement, based on the imaging experience presented by the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design, focuses on personalized photography experiences.

While enhancing image quality, Honor's imaging technology can also continuously learn users' shooting habits, allowing the AI Light Control Engine to provide customized photography parameter settings, enabling users to take high-quality photos without professional photography knowledge, meeting the shooting needs of different users in various scenarios The static photography capabilities of domestic high-end smartphones far exceed those of similar products from Apple, but their dynamic shooting capabilities still lag behind.

This time, the Honor Magic7 RSR Porsche Design has also seen a significant improvement in video recording performance: it supports high resolution and various frame rate options, meeting the professional needs of video creators.

During video shooting, the AI Light Engine can optimize the brightness, color, and contrast of the image in real-time, making the video footage more vivid and natural. Even in complex lighting environments, it can produce high-quality video works.

Wall Street News noted that on December 23rd, at the imaging technology communication meeting held by Honor, the presence of Honor's Chief Imaging Engineer, Luo Wei, was observed.

Who is Luo Wei?

According to informed sources, "Mr. Luo (Wei) was previously with Huawei's terminal division (formerly Huawei CBG) and was one of the three key figures who established Huawei's imaging peak position; the other two are Deng Bin and Richard Yu."

Before joining Honor in May of this year, Luo Wei was a Huawei Fellow, serving in key positions such as Chief Engineer of Cyberverse (HeTu) and Chief Engineer of Imaging.

From 2012 to 2020, Luo Wei served as Chief Camera Engineer at Huawei's terminal division, where he built and developed Huawei's imaging R&D team, leading a series of influential classic products: such as Huawei P9, Huawei P20, Mate30, and Honor 6 Plus; from 2020 to 2022, he was mainly responsible for Huawei HeTu R&D.

Huawei Fellow, or Huawei Academician, is typically a leading figure in Huawei's internal technology field and a leader and promoter of technological innovation; it requires a solid technical foundation and a broad knowledge base, capable of providing innovative solutions to complex technical problems, distributed across different technical fields and business departments