chris.pugrud
 lvl.2
United States
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Deeper digging by Disassembling the DJI Phantom 3 Camera reveals that the P3Pro camera uses the Ambarella A9 SOC which has some really impressive capabilites for a 2 year old 1st gen 4K/UHD image processor. The A9 provides a direct SDIO SDXC connection, so as long as DJI is using that connection there should be no bottleneck between the chip and the SDXC card.
(side note - the internal design of the P3 camera is very elegant and a work of art - congratulations DJI!)
The A9 appears to have some additional capabilities that DJI has not enabled (yet?). From the press release:
A9 Feature Summary
- 4K Ultra HD video recording at 30 frames per second for incredible detail.
- High definition video recording with 240 frames per second at 720p resolution.
- Burst mode support for still image capture of over 700 Megapixels per second.
- Multi-exposure High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging support, including local tone mapping, preserves image details in high contrast scenes.
- Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS) with rolling shutter correction.
- 3D Motion-Compensated Temporal Filtering (MCTF) with de-ghosting for reduced artifacts and excellent low light performance.
- Support for applications including wireless preview, playback, and upload of stills and videos to a smartphone or directly to the Internet over WiFi™.
- A rich set of interfaces including DDR3L, USB 2.0 host, HDMI, and SDXC SD™ card.
If you want to get excited for the future, check out the next generation Ambarella H1, which includes 4k60 and H.265 encoding.
In summary it appears that the A9 chip and board have important capabilites that DJI is not taking advantage of and there is room for DJI to improve the camera performance and capability through firmware. Hopefully DJI is willing to bring in Ambarella to help optimize the camera firmware and increase our capabilities. One concern is that Ambarella is the exclusive supplier of image processing SOC for GoPro, but I'm sure that DJI is also a significant customer of Ambarella and they should be wanting to help DJI optimize their firmware and showcase the capabilities of the A9.
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