The iPhone 7 rumors are rolling in, with practically all of them indicating a release date sometime in fall 2015.
The latest rumor is about an upgraded camera.
A source told John Gruber of The Talk Show that Apple is working on a big camera upgrade for the next iPhone.
“The specific thing I heard is that next years camera might be the biggest camera jump ever,” he said.
“I don’t even know what sense this makes, but I’ve heard that it’s some kind of weird two-lens system where the back camera uses two lenses and it somehow takes it up into DSLR quality imagery.”
HTC’s most recent phone, the M8, comes with two lenses, enabling users to add 3D effects to pictures, but Apple’s goal is believed to be added quality as opposed to special effects.
Sony recently announced that their new smartphone camera sensor packs 21-megapixels into a tiny 1/2. 4-inch design, leading to speculation that the sensor could be used in the iPhone 7 since Sony is Apple’s camera sensor supplier.
Another possibility is interchangeable lenses. An Apple patent from earlier this year indicated that the company is exploring utilizing multiple small, fixed focal-length lenses to the phone’s rear camera.
“Apple’s proposed fastening mechanism would use a series of small bayonet mounts located on both the phone and the lens. Rotating the lens in one direction would align the bayonets on both ends, attaching the lens to the camera; rotating it in the opposite direction would detach them,” reported Ars Technica.
“The patent also says that the lens and the phone could be detached from one another by force, presumably to protect the phone from damage if the lens was hit or dropped: ‘the attachment mechanisms may separate such that force applied to a first device may not be fully transferred to the second device, and thereby the second device may be protected.'”
*Top photo: (Flickr/Jan-Willem Reusink)
