It’s clear that the spec-war as well as the thinness is starting to come to an end. We’ve only really seen minor updates over the last few years when it comes to specs in our smartphones. Samsung knows this and believes that they can use their cameras to differentiate their products from their competitors. Which is always important in a market such as smartphones, where it’s pretty much saturated.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics Q1 2015 quarterly earnings conference call took place recently. They announced a 60.3 billion won increase on operating profit, which is a 303% increase over Q1 2014. During this earnings report, Samsung stated that they are working on a new camera technology for next year, 2016. Like we stated above, the spec war has about hit its ceiling and Samsung is aware of that, and is focusing on their cameras. Sources familiar with the situation are citing that the company already has a dual-camera prototype setup in the works featuring two sensors and lenses. They say it should be complete by the second half of 2015 and ready for market in the first half of 2016.
We’ve seen dual-cameras before on smartphones. Mainly, HTC. They did it with the HTC EVO 3D back in the day, and even more recently with the HTC One M8 last year. Both setups did totally different things, while the EVO 3D was for 3D pictures, obviously, the One M8 used the second camera for depth information and allowed for the user to do some pretty creative things with the pictures once they were taken. Which I thought was pretty cool, and a much better use for a second camera then doing 3D stuff with it. But that’s just me.
Whatever Samsung plans to do with this dual-camera setup, it will be interesting. Samsung has really been working hard on their cameras the last few generations. If you look at the Galaxy S6 camera compared to the Galaxy Note 4 or even Galaxy S5, you’ll see what I mean. The Galaxy S6 camera is just mind blowing. It’s that good. It’ll be interesting to see how they market the dual-camera setup, and how it’ll work though.