Hi,
so obviously the new FP2 camera module is up for sale already. I just ordered one because it’s rather cheap and while I was surprised by the camera quality of the original one, I was always longing for more. Especially the low dynamic range is very limiting for everything beyond snapshots.
But I think it would completely make sense to provide some full-res test images for customers to give them a chance to decide wheter buying a new camera module is a good idea or not.
So, If any of the FP-officials is reading this: please provide some compareable pictures made with the old and the new camera module on your shop page.
Until that happenes, let’s speculate:
We know that the old sensor is an OV8865 and the new one will again be from omnivision, this time the OV12870.
Coincidentally there’s the Xiaomi Mi 5c, a rather fresh middle-class smartphone which features a 8MP sensor for the selfie-cam and 12MP for the main camera. And rumors have it that these are exact the two sensors I stated above. So you can compare on review pages of the Mi 5c, like this one:
But take all this with at least two grains of salt: It’s a speculation based on rumors with pictures of a website of unknown repuation.
And there’s not just the sensor, it’s very likely that also the lens differs from the FP-lens as well as the jpeg handling which has a huge impact on the percepted image quality. The Xiaomi for example seems to have a pretty strong noise reduction which eliminates details and gives a more artificial look than the FP.
Oh, and the OV12870 features phase-detect-AF which is supposed to reduce time for autofocussing dramatically. This should also give much better AF for shooting videos if the software is done right.
I’d also like to see some high-iso, full-res images from the new sensor. Has anybody here had luck finding some?