Xiaomi is working on SLR-like smartphone camera

According to a patent, Xiaomi is working on a smartphone camera that is reminiscent of an SLR camera. It is still a bit sketchy in terms of details, but the Chinese manufacturer seems to be working on a major innovation in the field of smartphone photography.

SLR camera

It used to be that you didn’t walk around with a phone in your pocket to take pictures. Then you bought a Kodak disposable camera or you had a cheap, digital camera in your pocket where you had to transfer the photos to your PC with a cable. Not professional photographers and very fanatical amateurs: they had an SLR camera. That was the holy grail of photography. From National Geographic photographers shooting landscapes in the Sahara to gossip journalists looking to get the best shots of celebrities, the SLR is the ‘weapon’ of choice.

Until now, smartphones have not completely overtaken the SLR camera: you can still take the most beautiful pictures with such a camera in some areas. Logical: you can attach large lenses to it and there is much more room to let in light, for example, which often results in better photos. Phone makers have come a long way with the development of photos on a smartphone, especially if you consider how fast that has gone (read: especially if you think back to the phone you had around 2007). We’re only 15 years later, but the photos are infinitely farther along.

Xiaomi’s DSLR

Maybe that will get even better soon, as Xiaomi is working on a DSLR-like camera system. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex and therefore means SLR. But: how does such an SLR work? That’s pretty complicated. Light enters the camera through the lens, falls on a mirror in the device and reflects it through the prism to the viewfinder. The viewfinder is what your eye looks through to see what you’re shooting. If you press the button, the mirror flips up and that causes the light to change its path: it does not go to the viewfinder, but to the sensor of the camera. That sensor turns it into a digital signal and that ensures that the photo can be stored. All’s well that ends well.

That is very succinctly how something like this works in an SLR camera, but how do you translate that to a smartphone? Xiaomi thinks it knows. A patent has surfaced that shows that Xiaomi wants to change its camera island significantly. XiaomiUI stumbled upon it. It would work on a somewhat larger camera with a variable focal length (that in itself is not new, Samsung already had this with Galaxy S4 Zoom and K Zoom). Xiaomi no longer has a wide-angle camera on the back: there is one camera. It’s just a temporary image accompanying the patent, but it may actually be true that there’s only one camera left for the DSLR-like system that Xiaomi makes. We are curious how big the sensor is that the Chinese manufacturer wants to use for this. They play an important role in the amount of light that is admitted.

Do you think that the smartphone camera will soon be able to completely replace the SLR camera? Leave your opinion in the comments.