Broadcom's busting out some big muscle on the video chip front today, launching both a 1080p smartphone camera chip and a single-chip Blu-ray player chip. The BCM2763 mobile phone chip supports full 1080p video recording and playback, as well as 20 megapixel stills with face / smile detection and image stabilization. There's also support for 3D gaming at 1080p, and HDMI support is included so you can plug into a TV and actually see all those pixels -- and a 20-to-50 percent reduction in power usage means you'll be able to play video over HDMI for "up to 16 hours," although we'd like to see that claim tested in a real handset before we totally buy it. Broadcom's also hyping its new BCM7630 single-chip Blu-ray solution, which offers BD decoding and support for streaming apps like Netflix, Pandora, Vudu and CinemaNow all on a single chip -- and manufacturers can combine it with the new BCM7632 for 3d-Blu-ray support. Single-chip means cheaper Blu-ray decks -- so sure, we'll take it. No word on when any of these chippies are going to end up in production hardware, but we're hoping to hear more about that at CES.
posted December 15th 2009 1:24PM
2o mpx stills?.... that is going to take a long time to save onto a storage card, especially in a camera-phone.. But the 1080p video recording/ playback is certainly anticipated. 720 simply cannot make it.
@darkmax
I expect managing to save HD-video fast enough is a bit of a more pressing problem than stills.
You have to be kidding. The bitrate on this will be atrocious, and you're cheerleading trying to cram a BIGGER image into it? How about a CLEAN 480p image for starters?
Then there's this nonsense:
"The BCM2763 mobile phone chip supports full 1080p video recording and playback, as well as 20 megapixel stills".
That means one of two things are happening:
1. The image is being pointlessly blown up to 20 megapixels from something way smaller.
2. It's really a 20-megapixel chip and they're only using a tiny portion of it for the 1080 video. This is a very bad idea on any camera, because the higher the resolution, the tinier the photosites on the chip and the higher the noise. Instead of maximizing the size of the photosites (and the video quality) by making the chip only 1920x1080, they're packing 20 MP on there and destroying the quality with noise.
We need CLEAN images, not megapixels. Four clean megapixels would be a huge advance in cell-phone cameras. Hell, TWO clean megapixels would be.
Ahem, that should be "one of two things IS happening."
@Information Central This is not a camera sensor. This is a chip which has the capability to handle video decoding and encoding at 1080p resolution. It has the capability to handle 20MP still image encoding to JPEG.
This has nothing to do with the sensor quality.
Sensor will be a separate component developed by someone else. If some one wanted to build a camera around this chip, they could bundle two sensors, one for 1080p video and the other for 20MP still images.
It's a good time to be alive
@cardbored
I agree, but when can i has naow?!!
also, "gaming accelerator"
I've often wondered what the high definition (1080p) equivalent was in megapixels. 20Mpx, is that right?
@reddyroc Just over 2mp, so not high at all compared to still camera resolutions
@reddyroc No, 1080P is 1920x1080 pixels which is 2,073,600 pixels which is 2 megapixels.
@reddyroc try 2.0MPx. There's a megapixel calculator online here: http://web.forret.com/tools/megapixel.asp?width=3888&height=2592
Works great, and handy for video bitrate calculations as well!
@reddyroc 1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels. thats for P, for I divide the number by 2.
So 1080p is only 2 megapixels
@reddyroc cool, i love my 450d even more now.
Warning: Not exactly article related.
I swear, if I hear "it does 1080p" one more goddamn time without the mention of a bit-rate, I'm going to go crazy. Nobody gives half a shit if your camera does 1920x1080 at 1Mbps! It still looks like garbage.
@Evan: They are going for Blu-Ray support so expect at least 35 Mbps. Some Blu-Ray movies tend to go all the way up to 50 Mbps though.
@Evan Amen to that, Qualcomm pulled the same stunt with their ridiculous MSM7200 which caused a class action lawsuit for HTC
720P is BARELY on the top tier smartphones and they're going to 1080p?
I'm all for it, I just hope the quality is good since we won't be seeing phones with chip till 2011.
How do chip manufacturers give estimates for how long a device it's integrated into will be able to play video? They have no specs on the battery of said device, no knowledge of what other components that device will incorporate, no knowledge of what the power management software in that device will be like, etc. And yet somehow they pulled a 16-hour figure for video playback?
And what's with this megapixel pissing contest in camera phones? It seems that the focus should be on improving the quality of the sensors, making zoom and autofocus mainstream, incorporating a flash, and more importantly improving the software algorithms driving the hardware. A 5-megapixel cameraphone is nothing like a 5-megapixel camera, even a point and shoot. The Flip Video camcorders are a perfect example; the hardware is pretty cheap stuff, but their software algorithms allowed it to produce much better video than the componentry would have suggested. I understand that's video vs still image, but I think some of the lessons carry over.
@John H
Broadcom just makes the chip for phone manufacturers and gives them some theoretical possibilities to work with, it's not Broadcom's problem if the final results are bad. For all we know some other company might be working on a (currently unimaginable) way of taking decent 20MP images with cellphone-sized cameras, if that happened it would be great to have a chip that can do the necessary processing already available.
That's nice... Now if only we could get a sensor that doesn't suck. No matter how good the processor is, if the sensor sucks the images won't be good.
Also what about battery life?
@apairofdocs
As I said in my earlier post, while the article does give some general battery life figures (16 hours of playback through HDMI), actual performance will depend a lot more on the many other variables involved in whatever devices incorporate this chip.
@apairofdocs
The sensor will be small enough to fit in a phone, so it will suck by definition.
Bigger = better.
Screw 1080p...I would rather have an image sensor than can actually take high quality 480p. Rather than constantly upping the the quantity of pixels, they should focus on improving the quality of color reproduction, noise reduction, and low light ability.
@NikAmi
...and yes, I know that this article is not about the sensor technology...it's just as good a place as any for a rant.
@NikAmi
Have you checked out the Samsung Instinct HD phone? Google for some of the video reviews. That phone has the previous generation Broadcom chip in it, the BCM2727.
High bit counts on phones that can't handle it, with crappy little plastic lenses.
We need to get off these silly numbers and start caring about quality.
@nrb but that's exactly the opposite of what these companies actually do care about. 1080P has just become the latest buzzword, so expect the number to shoot up and quality to stay the same.
-Brian
Chips like this one are designed specifically for applications like phones, and have low power as one of the core requirements. Whether 16 hours video is questionable, but these are not generic chips that "happen" to work in cellphones and PDAs.
and 1080p or similar levels is needed as users start to push content from their home device to the cellphone and back again without compression. This will take a long time, needs better storage, but the processors are usually announced 12-24 months prior to a new device hitting the market,.
Resolution means nothing without good glass and high bit-rate.