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DxOMark’s night and wide-angle camera tests push today’s smartphones to their limits
Sure, you could take Apple’s word for it that the new iPhone’s cameras are amazing — or you could let some obsessive pixel-peepers perform some (mostly) objective tests and really get into the nitty-gritty. Pixel peepers in extraordinary DxOMark are here to help, with new tests focused on evaluating the latest gadgets’ night modes and ultra-wide-angle lenses.
The site’s already extensive image quality tests cover the usual aspects of a smartphone camera — color representation, exposure, noise, all that. But the latest devices are making advances in new directions that aren’t adequately covered by those tests; Namely the emergence of “night mode” shooting and multi-lens setups like the iPhone 11 Pro and its hulking rear camera assembly.
Therefore the tests must change! And DxOMark has begun including extremely nitpicky breakdowns of camera performance in the particularly difficult circumstances of extreme low light and extreme wide angle photography.
Night shots are graded on detail, noise, color reproduction — the kinds of things that tend to be lost in low light. Wide angle shots are graded on distortion, detail throughout the frame, and chromatic aberration — all difficult to correct for.
Some devices may be great in one area but poor in another, for example trading too much detail for lower noise in a night shot but getting great color. A higher score may indicate a better overall camera, but if you care about your phone photography you should look into what goes into that score as well. I for one never plan to use these ultra-wide cameras, so I can ignore that category altogether!
Now, this is an interesting area to grade such cameras in, and difficult one, because so much of the work is being done in software. As I’ve noted, the future (and of course the present) of photography is code, and without code there would be no night mode or ultra-wide angle shots.
The image stacking and denoising that allow low-light photography, and the speed of things like perspective correction and other tricks that allow a nearly fisheye lens to look relatively normal, are consequences of massive improvements in image processing efficiency and huge jumps in processing power. And they’ll only get better, even for a given camera-sensor-processor combo.
So DxOMark may find itself revising these scores — which are themselves being mapped retroactively onto reviews already posted: Low light performance is replacing the flash performance category, and wide angle is a new score.
The first phones to get the new treatment are the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10+, the Huawei P30 Pro, a handful of others, and of course the new iPhones. No doubt the upcoming Pixel 4 will be a contender as well, especially in the night mode category.
It’s good to know someone is systematically testing these aspects of phones with a critical eye. Watch for the updated tests and listings on DxOMark starting today.
Cryptographic ICE Cube tests orbital cybersecurity protocols aboard the ISS
Encryption in space can be tricky. Even if you do everything right, a cosmic ray might come along and flip a bit, sabotaging the whole secure protocol. So if you can’t radiation-harden the computer, what can you do? European Space Agency researchers are testing solutions right now in an experiment running on board the ISS.
Cosmic radiation flipping bits may sound like a rare occurrence, and in a way it is. But satellites and spacecraft are out there for a long time and it it only takes one such incident to potentially scuttle a whole mission. What can you do if you’re locked out of your own satellite? At that point it’s pretty much space junk. Just wait for it to burn up.
Larger, more expensive missions like GPS satellites and interplanetary craft use special hardened computers that are carefully proofed against cosmic rays and other things that go bump in the endless night out there. But these bespoke solutions are expensive and often bulky and heavy; if you’re trying to minimize costs and space to launch a constellation or student project, hardening isn’t always an option.
“We’re testing two related approaches to the encryption problem for non rad-hardened systems,” explained ESA’s Lukas Armborst in a news release. To keep costs down and hardware recognizable, the team is using a Raspberry Pi Zero board, one of the simplest and lowest-cost full-fledged computers you can buy these days. It’s mostly unmodified, just coated to meet ISS safety requirements.
It’s the heart of the Cryptography International Commercial Experiments Cube, or Cryptographic ICE Cube, or CryptIC. The first option they’re pursuing is a relatively traditional software one: hard-coded backup keys. If a bit gets flipped and the current encryption key is no longer valid, they can switch to one of those.
“This needs to be done in a secure and reliable way, to restore the secure link very quickly,” said Armborst. It relies on “a secondary fall-back base key, which is wired into the hardware so it cannot be compromised. However, this hardware solution can only be done for a limited number of keys, reducing flexibility.”
If you’re expecting one failure per year and a five year mission, you could put 20 keys and be done with it. But for longer missions or higher exposures, you might want something more robust. That’s the other option, an “experimental hardware reconfiguration approach.”
“A number of microprocessor cores are inside CryptIC as customizable, field-programmable gate arrays, rather than fixed computer chips,” Armborst explained. “These cores are redundant copies of the same functionality. Accordingly, if one core fails then another can step in, while the faulty core reloads its configuration, thereby repairing itself.”
In other words, the encryption software would be running in parallel with itself and one part would be ready to take over and serve as a template for repairs should another core fail due to radiation interference.
A CERN-developed radiation dosimeter is flying inside the enclosure as well, measuring the exposure the device has over the next year of operation. And a set of flash memory units are sitting inside to see which is the most reliable in orbital conditions. Like many experiments on the ISS, this one has many purposes. The encryption tests are set to begin shortly and we’ll know how the two methods fared next summer.