When pictures or videos are taken using a handheld camera, any movement in the person's hand can cause the picture to be blurry or the video to be shaky. For pictures this problem gets worse in low light conditions where the exposure needs to be longer to allow more light to reach the sensor. The longer the exposure, the higher the chance that the user will shake resulting in a blurry image. Alternatively, exposure times can be kept shorter and the gain can be increased (digitally amplifying the sensor signal). This however, also amplifies noise (mistakes by the sensor in detecting the correct color) and results in grainy looking images. OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) is a method of counteracting hand shake from the user and solves both of these problems by allowing the exposure time to be longer without hand shake blurring the image resulting in clear, bright, low-light images and smoother videos.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our SMA OIS solution, we set up a smartphone incorporating a SMA OIS camera onto a shaker table pointed at a test pattern. We then pointed a laser beam through the test pattern and reflected it off the phone body near the camera and back onto the pattern. We captured video and pictures with OIS on and off to demonstrate SMA OIS's effectiveness on pictures and video. The brighter red dot to the bottom left is the laser pointing at the phone and the other is the reflected laser spot. When OIS is on you can clearly see OIS is counteracting the phone shake and producing stabilized video and clear images. Movement of the reflected laser relative to the stabilized image demonstrates how much and how fast the phone is shaking.
To demonstrate SMA OIS in a real world low light setting, we compared low light images from a leading Japanese & Chinese phone brand using 13MP non OIS cameras to the FIH m530 which uses a 13 MP camera incorporating SMA OIS. We also compared OIS on and on the FIH phone to directly demonstrate the improvement that SMA OIS makes to low light photography. The results can be seen in the following video which shows photographs full size first then zoomed in closer to actual size. Lastly, all 4 images are compared on one slide. As you will see SMA OIS significantly eliminates blur caused by hand shake and enables impressive low light photos.
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