Aug 29, 2019

Your Pictures Just Got a Little Prettier


So you just got a new smartphone? Excellent. It should be packed with incredible features including a camera so capable it replaces any digital camera you previously owned for everyday use. With its unbeatable convenience, it’s no surprise that smartphone cameras are now the most common day-to-day camera. What else would you use to take selfies or photos of your friends and family?

The latest camera in your new phone likely takes clearer pictures (higher resolution), focuses faster and processes images more easily – features made better by the use of two cameras on your phone rather than one. But above all, the improved picture quality – particularly in dim or dark locations where you use the flash –sets this phone’s camera above its predecessor.

So what is even the difference between your new phone’s camera and your older camera?

The flash illuminators in camera phones evolved quickly from xenon flash to LED, to dual LED, then quad LED in 2016-2017 flagship smartphones. In our latest rendition of flash LEDs, we’ve closely tuned the LED’s spectral emission properties to that of the camera’s sensor to produce more colorful photos. The LUXEON Flash 9X with Spectral Pure Technology specifically enhance the vibrancy of skin tones, but also make red and blue colors appear more vibrant, and wood grains and warm tones appear richer.

Color reproduction depends on the illumination, the object reflectance and the detector used in the specific setting. LED spectral emission properties can be carefully tuned to optimize, so it’s critical that the camera adjusts based on where you are taking the photos – your home, outside, in a restaurant, at a concert, etc.

To illustrate, we staged a dim restaurant scene and took the first picture using commercially-available smartphones, with a typical 80 CRI LED flash. We then took a second photo with the same phone, but one outfitted with our LUXEON Flash 9X with Spectral Pure Technology. Notice the healthier and more natural looking skin tones, fresher color of the blue jean jacket and the richer wood tones in the table and wall. Pretty clear difference!

80 CRI

Photos taken with a flash LED of 80CRI makes people’s skin tones appear more sallow.

Photos taken on a phone with LUXEON Flash 9X with Spectral Pure Technology demonstrate a healthy skin tone, while the blue and warm colors also appear more vibrant.

We feel so strongly that tuning to the camera’s sensor is the future of camera flash that we’ve introduced a new metric, camera color index (CCI, similar to CRI, color rendering index), which we believe will quickly be adopted as a best practice in flash LED manufacturing.

To illustrate this further, we’ve created a new white paper that introduces CCI and details how we matched the SpectralPure Technology to the spectral sensitivity curve of the camera sensor.