Xiaomi’s R&D Team Talk About Liquid Lens
Today Xiaomi released a video showing the 2021 Xiaomi Annual Technology Award second prize winner: the liquid camera team’s introduction to this technology. The lens, which debuted on the Xiaomi MIX FOLD, enables the coexistence of telephoto and macro and is the industry’s first liquid lens camera to achieve mass production.
A cell phone, how to shoot a perfect telephoto, macro effect with one click?
A liquid lens is an answer from Xiaomi. 2021, Xiaomi premiered the liquid camera on MIX FOLD and mass production, breaking through the traditional solid-state lens limitation of cell phones, greatly improving the magnification and image quality effect. Today, we asked the liquid camera team, the second prize winner of the 2021 Xiaomi Annual Technology Award, to talk about what breakthroughs they made while exploring this technical no-man’s land.
Xiaomi
The technical team says that the camera can achieve nearly two times better image quality in the center of the field of view with the same 3cm macro image while maintaining high pixel and module size, and the MIX FOLD can present up to 12.25x lossless magnification.
Xiaomi liquid camera engineers, innovative design of the focus program, self-developed AF algorithm, to achieve a large range of high-precision focus, to solve the problem of conventional smartphones through the picture cropping magnification to achieve the macro effect of poor image quality.
The technical staff said that the liquid lens itself is different from the traditional solid lens camera in terms of material, structure, and drive method. The liquid lens is like putting a drop of water into a plastic capsule to achieve precise control while retaining its original shape, which brings a lot of difficulties to the structure and motor design.
Due to the complex assembly connection method, nanometer-level high precision, and high sensitivity of liquid, the development of a liquid lens is a huge challenge. The team spent a lot of time on simulation and performance impact assessment during the R&D process to determine the appropriate specifications for the components and to achieve a balance between design performance and mass production.
Xiaomi liquid lens engineers also revealed that the yield rate of this product was initially less than 10%, but after efforts have been raised to 90%.
