Sony teases an ultra low light camera for its upcoming phones

This morning’s Sony press conference was a real brief. The company said two new phones and the ease of use of its Xperia Ear Duo, still managed to covering it all up in about an hour. All said, it was actually kind of refreshing to be in and out so quickly. There was a quick “one more thing,” however, as it teased a future camera technology aimed at shooting in ultra-low light conditions.

The news seemed to be targeted at last night’s Samsung Galaxy S9 expose as much as anything. And as Sony happily pointed out on stage, it exhausted Samsung to the punch with super slow motion, when it familiarized 960FPS shooting with last year’s flagship. Of course, as someone who follow the industry will happily point out, people don’t actually buy Xperia phones, really. So existence first doesn’t really count for that much, out there serving as a kind of proof of concept of what the company’s working on.

With that in mind, it’s virtually as useful to tell just an audience of tech journalists that it’s working on a solution to low light shooting and feature a couple of samples at its booth. Of course, the new Xperia XZ2 has a couple of camera tricks of its own, as well as, most notably, 4K HDR video shooting. But those seeing for a Sony handset that really tackles the problem of low light are going to take to wait.

Samsung, meanwhile, takes a capable step in that direction this week, with the dual aperture S9, which ports that technology over from the company’s newly released flip phone, of all places. Like Samsung’s offering, the new Sony device will sport dual lenses — a first for the enterprise, in spite of this one long-standing camera-first push.

Sony’s not revealing too far at the moment (next all, it takes two other new phones for the show), but it abilities the technology will be capable of some really impressive low light shooting — a long time hesitant block for most handsets. The company says the new technology will be accomplished of capturing photos with an ISO up to 52,100 and video up to 12,800.

Low light has been something of a hesitant block for handsets — and, indeed both Samsung and ZTE have prepared a major selling point for their newly stated phones. After all, a large percentage of social media shots take place in poorly lit places like bars and restaurants. A really great low light solution will go a way to helping decrease noise and blur is less than ideal settings.

No word on when the tech will actually come to on Sony’s handsets — or, for that matter, third party devices.