New phone camera tech could solve blurry photos, give you 400MP telephoto shots

TECNO has showcased more than its fair share of camera phone innovations in recent years. The company prioritized darker skin tones way before Google, while it’s more recently revealed a custom imaging chip and a phone with a retractable telephoto camera.

Now, the Chinese manufacturer has announced two new camera technologies at its Future Lens 2024 event. The first technology is called EVS Dynamic Snapshot, and it promises to deliver blur-free images.

A new way to capture blur-free shots

EVS Dynamic Snapshot uses an event-based vision sensor (EVS) paired with a conventional RGB camera to clearly capture moving subjects.

“Whereas traditional cameras collect pixels frame-by-frame, TECNO’s solution captures the complete motion path of a subject,” the company explained. “The technology focuses solely on moving subjects, using EVS pixels to record motion data.”

TECNO further elaborated on this snapshot tech, saying it captures pixel changes “at an ultra-high frequency.” The moving objects detected by the event-based sensor are then combined with the static objects captured by the conventional camera to produce a sharp image of a fast-moving scene.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because sensor designer Prophesee previously showcased this tech last year. Back then, Prophesee touted its event-based vision sensor technology in partnership with Qualcomm. The company explained that its sensor tech captures pixel changes rather than the entire scene to produce motion data. This motion data is then paired with a conventional camera sensor to offer sharp shots of moving subjects.

Prophesee noted a few limitations at the time. The event-based sensor needed to be paired with a specific RGB camera, so you couldn’t use this tech via the ultrawide or telephoto cameras if it was paired with the main sensor. This tech also supported a maximum resolution of 12MP, although many smartphones shoot at a binned ~12MP by default anyway. We’ve asked TECNO whether these limitations apply to its own EVS Dynamic Snapshot tech.

In any event, the Chinese brand says you can use this tech to clearly capture birds in flight or cars driving at high-speed (e.g. at a race track). This could also potentially be handy for photographing pets and kids.

Tap Any Zoom Dual Prism Telephoto

The company also announced an interesting telephoto camera solution, called Tap Any Zoom Dual Prism Telephoto technology  (what a mouthful). This is a periscope telephoto camera with two prisms, lens-shift optical image stabilization, and “intelligent AI algorithms.”

TECNO says this solution enables a few features. For one, users can double-tap a subject to automatically zoom in on it up to 30x. This theoretically means you don’t have to pinch to zoom in on a subject. One strange limitation is that you can only double-tap on a subject while using the ultrawide or main cameras rather than initiating it while already in the tele camera. Still, this sounds like a less finicky method of handling camera zoom than pinching, which requires two hands.

This camera system also enables a so-called Telephoto Sweep feature which composites images from the telephoto camera into a giant 400MP picture with a wider field-of-view than conventional telephoto cameras. The company didn’t explain whether users need to move the phone (akin to a panorama shot or Photosphere) to create this composite picture, although we’re guessing you’ll need to do this. Nevertheless, TECNO says this approach allows users to reframe/crop the image after the fact. We hope the company is able to avoid some issues with composite image capture such as stitching problems.

We’ve asked TECNO for more details about the Telephoto Sweep feature (e.g. capture time, image processing, whether you need to move the phone) and will update the article accordingly. We’ve also asked the manufacturer whether these technologies will be coming to any commercial phones in 2025.