Corephotonic dual-camera puts optical zoom on phones

Phone photography has come so far in the last few years. But something that could use a little improvement is actually zooming in. We're taking a look now at something that hopes to improve that. So, this is a dual-camera system. It's part of a collaboration between an Israeli startup called Corephotonics, and Qualcomm. Here's how it works. This module itself has two camera lenses. They're both 13-megapixel cameras. However, one is a standard wide-angle lens that you get in most smart phones, and one is a special telephoto lens. Now, when the images from those two lenses are combined, what you get is an image that's capable of up to three times optical zoom in stills. What's cool is that it achieves that even though there are no moving parts in here. In normal cameras, the chunkier kind, when you zoom in, there are actual moving parts. But here, everything's fixed. We've been looking at some demos, and I have to say it looks like by combining those two lenses, you get a really crisp photo. You can see in the difference here, not only is there less noise, but there's just so much more clarity, too. It uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 chip. And this could potentially be good, as well, for low light photography. And that's because there are two lenses, so you just get more light taking in. It's really interesting tech. Hopefully, it will appear in some real smartphones that we can actually buy before too long so that we can really put it to the test. I'm Luke Westaway for CNET here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Check out CNET.com for loads more.